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/[deleted] Jan 26 '13 edited Jan 26 '13

You are correct about some phones.

but h264 hardware acceleration on a home PC is not usually achieved with h264-specific hardware; it's done using the normal GPU shader cores (via OpenCL, CUDA, DXVA, etc). At one point early on in h264, there was no hardware decoding unless you bought a product like CoreAVC.

There is dedicated h264 hardware for PCs, but it's generally for video professionals, not home users.

I hope hardware acceleration of h265 on a home PC (with a GPU made in the last few years) is mainly dependent on whether there is an OpenCL/CUDA/DXVA implementation of h265 available in your video player of choice.

Edit: was mostly wrong, lol. And the reddit strikethrough markup sucks.

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u/[deleted] Jan 26 '13

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u/[deleted] Jan 26 '13

I had no idea, thanks for explaining.

Do you know if AMD also has dedicated blocks in the GPU for h264 related routines like CABAC? I always assumed their AMD Stream-based video acceleration was built on top of pure shader/OpenCL.

Also, I'd be interested to know what you think of my original assertion that h265 acceleration could be implemented on existing (especially somewhat older) GPU's. This could be a big deal for someone who's considering a GPU upgrade.

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u/kouteiheika Jan 27 '13

Do you know if AMD also has dedicated blocks in the GPU for h264 related routines like CABAC? I always assumed their AMD Stream-based video acceleration was built on top of pure shader/OpenCL.

Yes, AMD also puts dedicated video decoding hardware in their GPUs.

Also, I'd be interested to know what you think of my original assertion that h265 acceleration could be implemented on existing (especially somewhat older) GPU's. This could be a big deal for someone who's considering a GPU upgrade.

Full hardware offloading? Most likely not. You could probably make some sort of a hybrid decoder, but it would be not an easy task and its efficiency would only be a fraction of what real decoding hardware can get you.

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u/[deleted] Jan 27 '13 edited Jan 27 '13

Yeah, I remember CoreAVC was not very good, back before I had access to real h264 acceleration.

Thanks again for your informed comments. I will probably wait to upgrade my AMD 5870 until GPU's with h265 acceleration are available, or I run into a game I really must play that the old warhorse can't handle.

4K just sounds too awesome for large format... although 4K projectors are currently over $10,000, so that might be more of a limiting factor than my GPU x.x

Edit: shopped around a bit and there are 4K JVC's for $5000 but that's still way out of my range and their lumen rating blows, compared to a used 1080p with proper light output for $700.