How to Install H 264 Video Codec in After Effects
H.265 benchmarked: Does the next-generation video codec live up to expectations?
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The next-generation High Efficiency Video codec (HEVC), H.265, has hit a major public milestone thanks to the work of the developer MultiCoreWare. MCW is launching a new commercial open-source venture around x265, and the source code for its x265 encoder is now available. Right now, the project is very much in early days — pre-alpha level code — but the x265 encoder is already impressively parallelized and supports all of the major instruction sets including AVX/AVX2 and FMA3/FMA4.
We've talked about H.265 and next-generation video encoding technologies several times in the past 12 months, but this is the first time we've had the chance to sit down with a next-generation encoder (albeit a pre-alpha version) to examine both performance and video quality. We've put together a comparison of both video quality and stream encode sizes versus H.264, as well as a quick look at performance across Sandy Bridge-E, Ivy Bridge, and Haswell.
The benefits of H.265
H.264 has been a huge success. It's a flexible codec standard that's used by streaming services, satellite providers, and for Blu-ray discs. It's scaled remarkably well since it was first proposed and is capable of handling 3D, 48-60 fps encodes, and even 4K. The Blu-ray disc standard doesn't currently include provisions for some of these technologies, but the H.264 codec itself is capable of handling them.
The problem with H.264, however, is that while it can handle these types of encodes, it can't do so while simultaneously keeping file sizes low. A new standard is necessary to push file/stream sizes back down while driving next-generation adoption, and that's where H.265 comes in. It's designed to utilize substantially less bandwidth thanks to advanced encoding techniques and a more sophisticated encode/decode model.
Unlike H.264, which can extend to cover 4K television but wasn't designed with the feature in mind, H.265 was built to match the capabilities of future screens and includes support for 10-bit color and high frame rates. This is early days — support and capability of the current alpha are limited to 8-bit color and YUV output, but we still wanted to take the alpha technology out for a spin. Armed with a freshly compiled version and some test clips, we set out to see what we could build.
First up — file sizes. What we're comparing here is actually the size of the elementary video stream. Note that these are video streams only — audio isn't encoded in either instance. Encode sizes were defined by the quantizer setting, with lower q-values equaling a higher quality (and larger file size). The base encoded file is 500 frames of a 1.5GB, YUV 4:2:0 file at 50 fps. The elementary stream file size is used for comparison here because it represents what's transmitted to the decoder to create the final output. We're working with elementary streams because, at this stage of the project (pre-alpha), the decoded video file always comes back at 1.5GB, regardless of the stream quality used to create it.
This gives a good basic idea of what sorts of benefits H.265 can offer compared to H.264. While it's not hitting 50% bandwidth savings in most cases, it's close — quantizer 24 is 57% the size, q=30 is 59%, and q=40 is just 47%. Granted, at a quantizer of 40, the final output is wretched — but it's wretched at less than half the bandwidth.
Next page: Performance and image quality
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How to Install H 264 Video Codec in After Effects
Source: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/162027-h-265-benchmarked-does-the-next-generation-video-codec-live-up-to-expectations