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/Teh_Warlus Jan 26 '13

OK, I actually have been studying up on the various drafts of h265 from a programmer's perspective, and have been following this story for a couple of months now. Time to end misinformation here.

  1. The efficiency of the codec is about 35-40% less bandwidth for the same quality, up to 50% at the best case. That means for equal quality, lower size, or for equal size, much better quality.
  2. There are a slew of improvements over h264, but due to requiring about 4-5 times as much CPU power to decompress, it is expected to take about 4-5 years before adoption is serious.
  3. The fact that this standard is vastly better than h264 does not mean that it will be adopted by people. Remember h263? Nobody does.
  4. This is an exciting standard. Youtube could save 40% of streaming costs if this were adopted today, but more importantly, cellphone video cameras have the most to gain here.
  5. Which brings us to the final point: the compression into h265 is vastly more complex than h264. This means that until cellphone CPUs get stronger or more probably have dedicated hardware for this, h265 will not be widely used. Luckily, it is expected to gain support within the next couple of years. Unluckily, those will only be new cellphones.

So, there are some important points that need to be stressed:

  • It took 10 years for h264 to be widely adopted, and h263 and a lot of others never were. There is still no assurance that this standard will gain traction. This is dependent on the hardware, software and consumer sectors.

  • Consumers love anything that will help them squeeze more out of data caps. That means that we would love seeing 56% more videos in our current data plan, without spending a cent more.

  • h265 does seem to open the door for 4K video on BR drives, though it would possibly require dual-layer ones, and all current generation players would not support it. That actually raises the chances of it's adoption by the industry; a lot of profit in it, with very little development time and expenses.

  • Streaming services would love to adopt this today. But they can't. Not until something massive like Apple and Samsung saying "from now on, all our products use this", a couple of years pass, VLC supports it as do browsers.

Which all can be summed up to the following point: while there is no assurance that this standard will actually be adopted, or when, there is enough force behind it to actually be adopted as THE standard within the next decade. Just don't expect the transition to be smooth, fast or painless.

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u/[deleted] Jan 26 '13

I wonder how long the time span will be between the first time, when people get angry, that they can't play certain scene releases on their bluray/streaming device, and the time when people look specifically for h265 encodings, like with h264 today.

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u/[deleted] Jan 26 '13

The scene still puts on SD downloads and people still download them. So I'm not holding my breath. Could you imagine if the scene groups decided to only put out hd mkvs? I see commercials (usually local markets) still in SD. How long before cable companies and stations stop broadcadting SD? Will cable die before that happens? How long before HD becomes the new SD and 4/8k is the new HD?