Question / Help hev/h.265

[Jollyriffic]

Netflix is already using this. how soon till we can get this added into the broadcast software?
i understand that currently twitch and others aren't using this yet, however, there's no reason we shouldn't have it implemented since i can still record in it.
this would also put pressure on the streaming sites to add support for it. because the first one to announce "we do hevc/h.265" is going to get a lot of press release and people going nuts over it.
same thing goes with the competition between xsplit and obs. while xsplit is a laughable program, it would still be nice to see obs stomp on their necks a bit more.

 

[Lain]

Using h265 for real time encoding is still way off. That being said, any coder that wants to do it for whatever crazy reason will be able to implement it in new upcoming versions.

 

[Boildown]

"Big companies" plan to roll out HEVC encoding capabilities before the end of the year (and in 10-bit too!), which means that they expect decoding to be available as well. From a technical standpoint this will be really cool, but practically I'm not sure its actually any better, most of all for live-streaming where CPU usage is a factor. The main use-case initially will be be for pre-recorded content where they render the content once in non-real-time and then stream it out on demand. This is because of how intensive it is to encode. For real-time encoding, the quality per bitrate per unit of CPU usage won't be better than what we have now when HEVC sees initially sees the light of day.

As far as OBS goes, it'll depend on when the re-write is out and then how soon someone wants to code it, just like for NVENC and Quicksync. I anticipate someone will do it quickly as proof of concept or "just 'cause", because there's so much interest. But I don't think it will actually be useful for stuff for a while, as Jim said.

 

[Boildown]

It seems like I'm wrong about on-demand only. At least three "big companies" will be selling appliances (or updates to current appliances) to media companies or broadcasters to live stream using HEVC by the end of May, based on what was seen at a Las Vegas convention the previous week. In 4k too. It takes twice the CPU to encode as H.264 (they are all software encoders), but its essentially here now. I'm curious to find out what can play these things back. If we were to send Twitch HEVC, I assume the player would choke on it, but would it at least try to pass it through first, or would it choke before passing it through?

 

[Krazy]

The question is if/when Flash will support it. I believe Netflix and other companies like them are going to have to use a non-Flash player for their HEVC implementations.

Any sort of real-time HEVC encoder will likely not be anything consumer level, or if it is, it will be incredibly expensive. High quality hardware encoders generally are, and that's what they will have to be in order to do real time encoding. Unless HEVC works insanely well with lots of multithreading and the new 24 thread Xeons (http://ark.intel.com/products/75283/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-2697-v2-30M-Cache-2_70-GHz) actually allow you to stream in real time with HEVC...probably on a 2 CPU rig, but that's about the only semi-reasonable scenario I can imagine software HEVC being fast enough for real time.

 

[Jollyriffic]

so it uses twice the cpu but is that saying 2000kbps vs 2000kbps.
because 2000kbps x265 is the equivalent of 4000kbps x264. and thats understandable.
also as far as players, vlc already has x265 video playback capability.