X265 3.0 released

https://bitbucket.org/multicoreware/x265/src/46b84ff665fd301e384328972d3d1312a8c74599/doc/reST/releasenotes.rst?at=default&fileviewer=file-view-default

by htfy96 • 7 years ago

138 119 7 years ago

bitbucket.org

Gys• 7 years ago

x265 HEVC Encoder

atilimcetin• 7 years ago

I wonder if there is an article that compares X265 and https://github.com/intel/SVT-HEVC (in terms of speed, feature set, required hardware, software license, etc..) ?

muizelaar• 7 years ago

The best I've seen is https://twitter.com/fg118942/status/1092045469981671424

orastor• 7 years ago

Why not admit AV1 is all around better and work on it instead

alexandernst3• 7 years ago

Can you post a link to some data so we can compare both, please?

Koshkin• 7 years ago

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=av1+vs+x265&t=ffnt&ia=web

acdha6• 7 years ago

What value do you think your comment adds to the conversation? H.265 is a widely-used standard which millions of devices support and since it's older than AV1 anyone who cares about, for example, iOS users has the choice of using either H.265 or H.264 but not AV1. Even if you're using Chrome or Firefox on a desktop, you often don't want AV1 unless you have a burly CPU, aren't running on battery, and don't mind hearing your CPU fans (a quick search will show this is true even for WebM because millions of people still use devices which have hardware H.264 but require CPU-based decoding for WebM). If that's not true for you, a high-quality open-source H.265 encoder is a great tool.

Here are the current support stats — note the distinct lack of a common format newer than MPEG-4 even before you consider hardware support:

https://caniuse.com/#feat=mpeg4

https://caniuse.com/#feat=hevc

https://caniuse.com/#feat=webm

https://caniuse.com/#feat=av1

Dylan168073• 7 years ago

A lot of your argument is based on H.264, which is not part of the question. H.265 is not extremely common and also hard to CPU decode.

babypuncher7• 7 years ago

The lack of hardware support in my home theater ecosystem makes AV1 a non-starter for me.

microcolonel• 7 years ago

The lack of hardware support in my home theater ecosystem makes AV1 a non-starter for me.

What is a home theater ecosystem? If you're using a HTPC with Kodi or Windows, you'll either soon have good realtime AV1 decoding, or already have it.

It takes time, but it is coming along faster than other rollouts over the last couple decades. Microsoft had a usable AV1 decoder in the windows store basically a few weeks after the bitstream was frozen; and as dav1d is hooked in to more applications, the decode performance on commodity hardware (which can be cooled passively) is becoming good enough to be practical.

vetinari2• 7 years ago

By the same criteria, HEVC is non-starter for me. Unfortunately for me, the world around me didn't stop developing, just to fulfill my wishes.

Expect the same with AV1.

skunkworker• 7 years ago

Better? There isn't AV1 hardware decoding, encoding takes much much longer than h.264/h.265. We are only now starting to be able to target devices with h.265 reliability.

shmerl2• 7 years ago

It is surely better in the long term. AV1 encoders need a lot of work still to be usable though in real time, which is critical for something like WebRTC.

For example, rav1e still needs multithreading support: https://github.com/xiph/rav1e/issues/132

And once encoders are ironed out, hardware support is also needed.

qualityfirst2• 7 years ago

In the end AV1 will likely have about the same level of adoption as VP9 ... pretty much googe/youtube only. Allowing Google to monopolize video standards is not something that the hardware world is going to accept. HEVC already has near universal hardware support. Why bother with supporting AV1?

vetinari2• 7 years ago

Google, Netflix, Amazon... so basically overwhelming majority of the video on the Internet. Left is broadcast video, where the HEVC support can be relegated to set-top boxes.

So yes, hardware world is going to accept AV1.

clouddrover10• 7 years ago

It's not just YouTube. Netflix uses VP9:

https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/more-efficient-mobile-en...

https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/performance-comparison-o...

Twitch uses VP9:

https://blog.twitch.tv/how-does-vp9-deliver-value-for-twitch...

Both Twitch and Netflix will use AV1 in the future.

acdha6• 7 years ago

VP9 is the same generation as HEVC and performs about the same so the only reasons to favor one over the other would be financial and client support. For many providers this means 3 copies: VP9 for Android, HEVC for iOS/Mac, and H.264 for older devices.

AV1 is newer and should offer improvements over both previous generation codecs. Hardware support will be a significant factor but it’s looking as if in a few years you’ll have the option to use one better format on most modern devices.

Havoc3• 7 years ago

Must say I'm massively surprised at how low adoption of 265/hevc is in ahem the eyepatch wearing part of the internet.

babypuncher7• 7 years ago

That whole scene perplexes me. They're still obsessed with their 10bit h.264 videos which just don't even play on a Roku or smart TV.

I've been using x265 for my personal rips for about two years now.

josteink2• 7 years ago

Simple guess/answer: in quantity upload time/bw (x2 for x264) is massively cheaper than encoding time (x100 for x265).

Also: if you’re doing 2160p 10bit HDR, there’s no chance those Rokus are going to play them anyway.

Disclaimer: not involved with the scene at all, so this is mostly educated speculation.

BurningCycles• 7 years ago

I believe you are talking about the 'anime' encoders, as for 'scene' releases, they are all in 8bit h264 AFAIK.

Also when it comes to anime, doing a quick search on Nyaa it looks like 10bit is used on less than a tenth of releases, with h265 being in that same range as well.

I dare say 8bit h264 is still the undisputed king of piracy.

orev• 7 years ago

Many devices, especially older ones, only support h264 in hardware, which makes a huge impact on battery life. h265 would need software decoding and this a huge drop in battery life for those devices.

ploxiln• 7 years ago

... or just plain impossible if you don't have a recent beefy desktop-class cpu.

bscphil• 7 years ago

This right here is the main reason. Pirate groups continued to do xvid encodes for many years after h264 was unquestionably superior for the exact same reason.

The big picture here is that we've hit the point of diminishing returns with video codecs. Up until h264, with lots of work you could improve codecs to get significant gains in compression with very little increase in complexity. That's pretty much done though. If we had to keep using h264 for videos for the rest of eternity it wouldn't be all that bad. Sure, eventually we'll want something a bit better most of the time, but when it's a choice between a 16 GB h264 encode and a 8 GB AV1 encode that takes 10x the CPU time to encode and decode, it's not unreasonable to think we might choose the former for many applications.

kristofferR3• 7 years ago

It's only recently been possible to actually use x265 for transparent encodes, previous versions of x265 removed film grain/digital noice to such a degree that the quality was worse than x264 at equivalent bitrates. Combine that with the massively increased costs in both encoding/decoding time (and worse x265 encoding tools/knowledge), x265 simply wasn't worthwhile except for crappy re-encodes at super low bitrates for people with crappy internet.

Recently you've begun to see a lot of x265 releases though, usually with HDR, the only significant feature x264 can't provide.

For sub-4K SDR content there's really no incentive for pirates to switch to x265, it's just a nuisance. With torrenting people don't pay for the extra bitrate x264 requires, unlike hosting services like Netflix, the ~20% bitrate savings of x265 are not important at all, especially compared to the other "costs" of compatibility issues and 10X longer encode times.

tracker16• 7 years ago

It's actually closer to 50% unless you are using hardware assisted encodes which aren't great currently... though I haven't tried on an RTX card yet, which is supposed to be better. So it does come down to time though.

dylan604• 7 years ago

VR took to HEVC pretty much from the beginning for mobile platforms. While it did take longer to encode, the resulting file was much more size friendly for mobile use and even the delivery bandwidth/download times to get it. I worked for a large post house, and developed a backend pipe line for the artists to be able to submit their output to the farm to create optimized h.265 files for their target devices.

fireattack• 7 years ago

previous versions of x265 removed film grain/digital noice

I noticed it as well, glad it gets fixed.

Do I need to toggle/change any particular parameter, or just use defaults on newer versions to fix it though?

stordoff• 7 years ago

It's only recently been possible to actually use x265 for transparent encodes, previous versions of x265 removed film grain/digital noice to such a degree that the quality was worse than x264 at equivalent bitrates.

I've noticed this recently - Slow RF16 encodes were _visually_ worse (as in during casual watching I was asking if the source was really this bad, and when I went back to compare it was not[1]). Going to Slower is not tenable (a movie encode already takes ~8 hous, going to Slower makes it take nearly 2 days) (and I'm not even sure it would help), and increasing the RF to 14 would mean as I'm as well off keeping the original file (in some cases, RF16 is already almost as big as the original).

[1] Random framegrab, not checking the labels until after - in every case, it was obvious which was which.

mr_toad• 7 years ago

~20% bitrate savings of x265

Ironically, most x265 movies I’ve seen appear to be HDR blu-ray rips with no attempt to reduce size at all, and they’re usually north of 50GB. You can get 80-90% bitrate savings on these without significant loss of quality.

danmaz74• 7 years ago

When you talk about film grain, are you referring to older movies, or also to recent ones? I usually don't notice it in recent ones.

Havoc3• 7 years ago

Good points. Thanks for explaining

tagrun2• 7 years ago

x265 never removed film grain; you need to enable it via --tune grain option (or -tune when using it via ffmpeg).

There's a new --tune animation option in 3.0 if you're encoding anime/cartoon.

tracker16• 7 years ago

It comes down to the type of degradation that happens and device support.

h.265 gets blurry, h.264 gets blocky. Higher quality encodes, especially of film will degrade worse in 265. Hardware is also much worse in terms of overall support for h.265.

My Nvidia Shield TV is the only small/arm device I've used that can reliably playback 4K h.265 video, specifically network content from my NAS (Kodi).

h.265 is much more common as an option for TV feeds, the quality is usually lower than BR anyway and the smaller size leads to better near term gratification, you can get a 1080p h.265 for often smaller than the 720p h.264 which looks significantly better.

I tend to prefer it for my own rips as I get a much smaller file size, which is starting to get scarce on my NAS. I prefer the blur to the blockiness myself, and my vision isn't the greatest anyway. YMMV.

tracker16• 7 years ago

Also, hardware assisted compression has really crappy quality for the file size you get. Using a software encoder like x265 is pretty much required, and even then takes a LONG time relatively speaking. Most are unwilling to do so for the gains in storage.

walterbell• 7 years ago

Could you share your h.265 Handbrake settings for 1080p?

agret4• 7 years ago

Yeah my PC with 6700k and GTX 1080 really struggles with x265 4K playback which is an incredibly laggy screen tearing mess. On my $50 Android box which has a hardware decoding chip for it the same video files run perfectly, butter smooth.

nominated12• 7 years ago

The scene values quality. It's why their file sizes seem large to some. x264 at CRF 18-21 still can't be matched by x265 at any bitrate.

I'm a videophile and have been using Avisynth (Vapoursynth mostly these days) since the DivX vs Xvid wars and every year I give x265 another chance only to be disappointed. There's also the hardware compatibility issue but regardless the quality would still have to be there.

Take a look at the most popular outstanding bugs and you'll notice many of them are regarding quality [1] The doom9 forums is also a good source. Many have posted comparisons proving the point.

[1] https://bitbucket.org/multicoreware/x265/issues?status=new&s...

paulmd4• 7 years ago

Really, it's blurry even if you throw a bunch of bitrate at it? Seems odd.

The one area with significant uptake that I've seen so far is anime, which if regular stuff gets blurry does make sense. The quality is actually really great there, and it can produce files that are extremely small at good quality (eg 25 minutes at 1080p with multi-language AAC tracks is often around 250-300 MB, with bluray quality).

(oh, also there is a poster who used to do a lot of scifi releases in x265, it looks OK although not bluray quality, and you can get a 45 minute episode in 1080p quality in about 700mb)

Personally I've tried encoding Shadowplay recordings to x265 a couple times (via ffmpeg, both through Handbrake and directly invoking ffmpeg on my server) and I get solid green video. I think it's the variable frame rate, it works OK if I pull it down to a constant framerate first, but that can produce juddering if I get framedrops when I'm playing.

agret4• 7 years ago

The scene values quality. It's why their file sizes seem large to some.

So many groups are still releasing shows & movies in XviD so I don't think that's necessarily true, you think by now everyone would be on x264.

joshschreuder• 7 years ago

I would have thought it was more preferring faster pretimes, as X264 encoding is much faster than X265? At least in the case of TV shows, maybe not so much movies where there might be a more exclusive source.

Havoc3• 7 years ago

There's also the hardware compatibility issue

Seems to be getting better (slowly). I just bought an asus tinkerboard for 50 bucks that supports 265.

e12e2• 7 years ago

You generally don't want to (lossy) re-encode released media (be that audio cds, network streams or Blu rays). One think is using a lpsdy codec to make the final "print" - it's another to try and manipulate that version further with lossy transformations.

That said, appears 4k hdr will see some x265 uptake.

e12e2• 7 years ago

Apologies for the mangled text - autocomplete abhors foreign language.

s/One think/One thing/

s/lpsdy codec/lossy codec/

NelsonMinar• 7 years ago

Same. It's a great space savings at (to me) a not very perceptible loss of quality. PSARips is the only scene group I know of doing regular x265 releases.

Old_Thrashbarg• 7 years ago

I know very little about these formats, but is H.265 patent-encumbered? If so, maybe people don't like supporting it?

userbinator2• 7 years ago

It is, just like H.264 and XviD (MPEG-4 ASP) before it. Pirates do not care about patents, only the technical aspects.

skrowl• 7 years ago

Still very poor hardware decode support. What good is saving a few GB of HD space if your phone runs out of battery 3x as fast because it's having to decode in software?

akerro• 7 years ago

My laptop can't decode 1080p x265/hevc but works fine with 2.7k x264

unicornporn• 7 years ago

Hopefully they'll adopt AV1 instead.

qualityfirst2• 7 years ago

Unlicensed content providers (this is the preferred politically correct term) have been doing HEVC UHD (4K) from day one.

Most TV shows and movies are available in HEVC at 720P and 1080P now but all it offers is smaller file sizes (not better quality) so most people don't care about it.

mrmondo• 7 years ago

Great to see Dolby Vision in the features there - I've been very impressed with it vs HDR10.

shmerl2• 7 years ago

Can't wait for fast AV1 encoders, and especially hardware support.

AceyMan• 7 years ago

Am I the only one who came to TFA looking for a screaming ThinkPad with a 7-row keyboard? <snaps fingers>

(downvotes—rly? That really was my first thought when I saw the title ...)

userbinator2• 7 years ago

Having spent time reading the standards recently (and implementing some toy decoders) I've noticed a pattern in video codec designs, starting from the very first one:

    H.261 - simple, not much more than MJPEG with P-frames.
    MPEG-1 - basically '261 with B-frames, pretty simple
    MPEG-2/H.262 - MPEG-1 with more complex interlacing stuff
    H.263 - no more interlacing, better low-bitrate performance
    MPEG-4 - absurd complexity that no one turned out to use most of anyway (3D scenes, face animation(!?), etc.)
    H.264 - back to regular video, with better I prediction
    H.265 - complex again?

Of course they do get more complex over time, but it seems like a cycle that alternates between incremental-yet-significant changes and huge redesigns that don't seem quite worth it.

richardwhiuk• 7 years ago

H.264s intermediate frames are none trivial. Some features do get dropped, but in the majority later standards are more complex.

ksec6• 7 years ago

Yes they are all built on top of previous innovation and work. So it is a long evolution in terms of video codec. And there is H.266 coming in 2020.

speedplane• 7 years ago

It is an evolution, but technological evolution doesn't necessarily follow an exponential curve. It took many years for H.264 and it looks like many more for H.266. The next version may take even longer. Innovation is slowing, and it has pretty profound effects for a variety of industrial sectors.

nyuszika7h• 7 years ago

Please don't use code formatting when not necessary, it's really hard to read on mobile.

tagrun2• 7 years ago

Film grain synthesis of AV1 is apparently worth it: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8416572

nisten• 7 years ago

From completely personal opinion and that of close friends:

x265 movies look way cleaner while having way smaller file sizes.

Also it's the best tradeoff between quality/filesize by factor of 2 or more. I'd personally notice artifacts in x264 movies unless they were over 7gb in size. With x265 i'll grab a 3gb version of a movie in a heartbeat (well a few heartbeats on gigabit fiber :) and not worry about picture quality at all.

at 15gigs or more for a 1080p movie x264 is pretty much perfect, unless you really want to see the film-grain.

ddalex2• 7 years ago

I'm re-coding all my drone footage from H.264 (hardware encoders on the drone) to x264. It's about 1/4th size with the same visual quality, so it's win-win

X265 3.0 released

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