HEVC

HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding, sometimes called H.265) is a new video compression format and is the successor of H.264. It was formalized on the 25th of November 2013 and published as ISO/IEC 23008-2:2013. Work on the open source HEVC decoder and encoder (x265) is still being done, but a proposed implementation of the codec has been made available.

Support in
Kodi v14 now has software decoding support for HEVC. v15-based nightly builds have limited hardware decoding support for some devices, such as a few Android-based video decoders. Most HTPCs will need a fairly powerful desktop class CPU in order to playback HEVC videos.