Early H.265 Testing
Since it's announcement last year, I have been intrigued about the potential of the new High Efficiency Video Coding also known as H.265.
According to the original specifications - the promise of H.265 is much higher fidelity and greatly improved compression over the current H.264 standard that has been in place for a decade.
For those of us who rip/covert DVD and BR videos into libraries we can share or load onto mobile devices, the potential is very cool. Suddenly the ability to reduce the storage and networking impact while still maintaining video quality is a game changer.
I have been waiting for some of the various ISVs to begin to integrate the new codecs in the their products and wanted to see how well this new technology works.
So recently the folks over at Div-X release their HEVC Plug-in for version 10.1 of their converter and player products. And so I decided to give it a try.
So here is the good, bad and ugly on H.265 conversion.
The Good - It does work. I took an existing BR movie that I ripped using Handbrake H.264 in an .m4v container and converted to HEVC in an .mkv container. The H.264 version consumed 5.71GB of storage. The new H.265 version reduced that to 2.49GB so less then half of the original size. During playback I noticed no difference in the video quality.
So this is a huge win in my opinion when it comes to managing your libraries.
In previous posts I discussed my approach to building a home video library, the one point I stressed was having enough storage to maintain a copy of the both the original ripped content in native .vob and/or .m2ts format as well as the converted .m4v file. While H.265 doesn't address the native content impact, the 50%+ reduction in resultant container size is fantastic.
The Bad - The conversions can take quite a while. I run a HP desktop with Core i-7 Processor and 8GB of RAM, the OS is on SSD and I run SATA-III drives for large storage. The single conversion I performed took well over 4 hours using the Div-X converter running under Windows 8.1 Also since Div-X is the only player to release a product using HEVC - you must use their player to view your results. Additionally I use Meta-X to add Artwork and other metadata to my .m4v files and while Meta-X mentions support for .mkv containers as well it could not write the data to the new format correctly.
The Ugly - When I created my original .m4v files using handbrake I made sure to include the Dolby Digital audio tracks so I could stream via iTunes to my Apple TVs and Home Theaters and get the sound quality I wanted. Div-X does not include DD audio codecs in their converter - so you need to download and install the proper AC3 "filters" for it to work with the DD audio. However in my initial experiments with the AC3 filters installed, the only audio that was properly converted was 2 ch stereo. I also wanted to convert a BR movie from the original .m2ts files to H.265 and see if there was any value in that approach in terms of further compression and/or audio options. In my experiments the conversions failed. They would start up and run for a while and then fail. So still performing some due diligence to determine the root cause - but obviously not an optimum situation.
Bottom Line - H.265 is a real game changer in terms of the storage and networking impact on compressed HD video and I applaud Div-X for getting a toolset out there for folks to begin working with. There are still a lot of teathing problems that you have to deal with - so I don't recommend going out yet and attempt to convert your existing H.264 content using the current tools. With that said, I expect that within 2014 the number and quality of the conversion tools will increase dramatically. The question will be with players. So for example will Apple include H.265 codec support for AppleTV and/or iPad. Will VLC support H.265 playback. Right now only time will tell but I am very encouraged by the early results I've seen.
According to the original specifications - the promise of H.265 is much higher fidelity and greatly improved compression over the current H.264 standard that has been in place for a decade.
For those of us who rip/covert DVD and BR videos into libraries we can share or load onto mobile devices, the potential is very cool. Suddenly the ability to reduce the storage and networking impact while still maintaining video quality is a game changer.
I have been waiting for some of the various ISVs to begin to integrate the new codecs in the their products and wanted to see how well this new technology works.
So recently the folks over at Div-X release their HEVC Plug-in for version 10.1 of their converter and player products. And so I decided to give it a try.
So here is the good, bad and ugly on H.265 conversion.
The Good - It does work. I took an existing BR movie that I ripped using Handbrake H.264 in an .m4v container and converted to HEVC in an .mkv container. The H.264 version consumed 5.71GB of storage. The new H.265 version reduced that to 2.49GB so less then half of the original size. During playback I noticed no difference in the video quality.
So this is a huge win in my opinion when it comes to managing your libraries.
In previous posts I discussed my approach to building a home video library, the one point I stressed was having enough storage to maintain a copy of the both the original ripped content in native .vob and/or .m2ts format as well as the converted .m4v file. While H.265 doesn't address the native content impact, the 50%+ reduction in resultant container size is fantastic.
The Bad - The conversions can take quite a while. I run a HP desktop with Core i-7 Processor and 8GB of RAM, the OS is on SSD and I run SATA-III drives for large storage. The single conversion I performed took well over 4 hours using the Div-X converter running under Windows 8.1 Also since Div-X is the only player to release a product using HEVC - you must use their player to view your results. Additionally I use Meta-X to add Artwork and other metadata to my .m4v files and while Meta-X mentions support for .mkv containers as well it could not write the data to the new format correctly.
The Ugly - When I created my original .m4v files using handbrake I made sure to include the Dolby Digital audio tracks so I could stream via iTunes to my Apple TVs and Home Theaters and get the sound quality I wanted. Div-X does not include DD audio codecs in their converter - so you need to download and install the proper AC3 "filters" for it to work with the DD audio. However in my initial experiments with the AC3 filters installed, the only audio that was properly converted was 2 ch stereo. I also wanted to convert a BR movie from the original .m2ts files to H.265 and see if there was any value in that approach in terms of further compression and/or audio options. In my experiments the conversions failed. They would start up and run for a while and then fail. So still performing some due diligence to determine the root cause - but obviously not an optimum situation.
Bottom Line - H.265 is a real game changer in terms of the storage and networking impact on compressed HD video and I applaud Div-X for getting a toolset out there for folks to begin working with. There are still a lot of teathing problems that you have to deal with - so I don't recommend going out yet and attempt to convert your existing H.264 content using the current tools. With that said, I expect that within 2014 the number and quality of the conversion tools will increase dramatically. The question will be with players. So for example will Apple include H.265 codec support for AppleTV and/or iPad. Will VLC support H.265 playback. Right now only time will tell but I am very encouraged by the early results I've seen.
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