Archive:HEVC

About HEVC

The HEVC codec (which is also known by the proposed - but unofficial - name h.265) is a new codec which has not been finalized.

Support in XBMC

As of this moment time (januari 2014) XBMC doesn't suppport the HEVC codec. Support for the HEVC codec will come when an update of FFmpeg is applied to DVDPlayer (XBMC's video player component).

Support in FFmpeg

The FFmpeg maintainers included support for the proposed version of the HEVC decoder in FFmpeg version 2.1.

This version of FFmpeg is not in use in the most recent builds of XBMC and since we are not allowing any more new features to go in to v13 'Gotham' development (we are in feature freeze) this feature will not make it into XBMC 13.0.

Planning

A first test to upgrade FFmpeg to the latest versions resulted in a severe memory leak which caused 16GB of memory usage within 20 minutes. Obviously these issues need to be resolved before you will see a version with FFmpeg 2.1 and there are developers working on it, but the main focus at this point in time is on releasing XBMC 13.0 'Gotham'

By the time the H.265 encoder is finalised and people start using it widely there will be support for it in XBMC, but at this moment we are not there yet. Therefore the best suggestion is to avoid using this encoder for the moment if you intend to play your creations with XBMC.

Hardware acceleration

Currently there are no hardware accelerated options to play HEVC content, so you would need a pretty beefy CPU to decode a highly compressed HEVC movie.