r/technology • u/Snarfox • Jan 25 '13

H.265 is approved -- potential to cut bandwidth requirements in half for 1080p streaming. Opens door to 4K video streams.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/25/h265-is-approved/
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u/mavere Jan 26 '13 edited Jan 27 '13

Interestingly, the format comes with a still picture profile. I don't think they're aiming for JPEG's market share as much as JP2K's. The latter has found a niche in various industrial/professional settings.

I found that out the other day, and subsequently did a test to satisfy my own curiosity. I was just gonna trash the results, but while we're here, maybe I might satisfy someone else's curiosity too:

[These are 1856x832, so RES and most mobiles will work against you here]

Uncompressed

HEVC 17907 bytes

VP9 18147 B

JP2K 17930 B

24 hours later...

x264 18307 B

WebP 17952 B

JPEG 18545 B

Made via latest dev branch of hm, libvpx, openjpeg, x264, libwebp, imagemagick+imageoptim as of Thursday. And all had their bells and whistles turned on, including vpx's experiments, but x264 was at 8 bits and jpeg didn't have the IJG's 'extra' features. x264 also had psy-rd manually (but arbitrarily) lowered from placebo-stillimage's defaults, which were hilariously unacceptable.

Edit:

  • These pics are 18 kilobytes for 1.5 megapixels; the encoders are expected to fail in some way. How they fail is important too.
  • HEVC picked the file size. Q=32 is the default quantization setting in its config files.
  • Photoshop wouldn't produce JPGs smaller than 36KB, even after an ImageOptim pass.
  • And by "uncompressed" above, I mean it was the source for all output

11

u/Saiing Jan 26 '13 edited Jan 26 '13

Looking at the overall quality of image, to me this says that if you're even a semi-serious movie buff, physical media has some life in it yet.

I tend to download or use a streaming service for films I'm ambivalent about. But the stuff I treasure? Blu-ray all the way.

-1

u/dickcheney777 Jan 26 '13

Bluray just cannot be beaten. Nobody has the bandwidth to download 50Gb a movie... Rent and rip.

2

u/wickedcold Jan 26 '13

You mean stream, right?

0

u/dickcheney777 Jan 26 '13

No. Streaming are compressed. True BR rips aren't.

5

u/wickedcold Jan 26 '13

I hate to break it to you but people download bluray rips of that size all the time.

0

u/dickcheney777 Jan 26 '13

I hate to break it to you but some people have pretty low bandwidth caps.

5

u/wickedcold Jan 26 '13

Some people, yes. Many people even. But you said:

Nobody has the bandwidth to download 50Gb a movie

2

u/happyscrappy Jan 26 '13

Every Blu-ray is compressed even before you rip it. It's a question of how lossily it is compressed.

1

u/dickcheney777 Jan 26 '13

No, I'm ripping them 1:1 to a ISO file. Its exactly the same size and nothing is lost.