handbrake to get quick sync support

[deadrats]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6864/handbrake-to-get-quicksync-support

to me this smacks of too little too late, intel spent 5 years and anywhere from 100 million to 1 billion dollars (i've seen both figures in various articles) developing quick sync and then out of fear of revealing trade secrets they didn't allow quick sync to be what it could have been.

unfortunately the old adage of "even the best laid plans of mice and men often go astray" reared its ugly head and h265, with a vastly superior way of compressing video, was finalized and the divx/main concept people already have a beta sdk available (under strict NDA) and within a few months divx plus converter (a free app) will have an h265 profile and even more importantly, there are reports that the blu-ray consortium is going to extend the blu-ray spec to include h265 and supposedly current blu-ray players will support the new codec with a simple firmware upgrade.

i honestly don't think within a year anyone will be doing any h264 encoding, with any encoder, unless for some devices that don't support h265.

maybe intel will include h265 encoding in some future cpu and maybe that time they'll handle the launch the right way.

[jman98]

Those are some pretty bold statements. I don't share your confidence in most of them.

Typically new video encoders require new decoding chips to be designed for them for players. Unless H.265 is basically H.264 with some extra options, I don't think it likely that a firmware update alone will enable it to work on BluRay players.

If I could think of a way test your hypothesis that within a year nobody will be doing any H.264 encoding, I'd take you up on that. Even if H.265 gains tremendous acceptance, within one year seems unrealistically optimistic to me.

Intel is worth so much money that like Microsoft, they can unfortunately afford to make massive blunders, lose a billion dollars, and shrug it off. However, the marketplace is changing quickly and Intel is finding that the explosive growth in tablets and mobile phones is something they weren't really prepared for (they barely, if at all, compete in those markets for CPUs) and their revenue is shrinking. Microsoft is actually finding their revenue is shrinking too for the same reason (they're not players in the tablet and phone markets), but it will be a few years before either company wakes up to the fact. The PC isn't going to die (sales in 2012 were actually slightly up over 2011) like many claim, but it's not going to be what it was in the past either.

Please don't fall into the trap that your post seems to be edging dangerously close to in believing that EVERYTHING that came before X was just complete and utter garbage and why oh why did we poor idiotic consumers ever buy such low quality crap? Even good old MPEG-1 is capable of producing good quality output under the right circumstances. There's nothing wrong with VC-1, MPEG-2 or H.264 and I'm not really seeing a huge need for H.265, but we'll see what happens. The manufacturers' dream that consumers are going to throw away their perfectly good HDTVs and embrace 2k technology (maybe H.265 is really intended for that) is just a fantasy.

[deadrats]

h265 most certainly is not h264 with some extra options, for one h265 does away with the concept of macroblocks.

with regards to a test of my prediction, i can think of a simple one, bookmark this thread, in one year (march 2014) visit every torrent site you can think of and check the codec of most of the files available, likewise check vod sites and see what codec they're using and check this forum's video conversion sub forum to see what codec most people are asking for help with most often.

i have seen quite a few preliminary tests, pitting the h265 beta reference encoder against both the reference h264 encoder and x264 and in every test i have seen h265 has come out ahead, at times achieving similar quality with as little as 1/2 to 1/3 the bit rate.

and it's not that i think vc-1, h264 or mpeg-2 are crap, it's that i don't see someone interested in transcoding a blu-ray source to say a 4mb/s 720p choosing any of these codecs over a codec that can deliver the same quality at half the bit rate or double the quality at the same bit rate.

of course, there is one thing that can derail the h265 train and that's google's vp9, which uses a similar coding scheme as h265, but is open source and as far as i know patent free.

but i do believe that h264's days as the compression scheme of choice are numbered.