Hacker News Reader

Comment by eikenberry | Hacker News Reader

The main hurdle for adoption, aside from onerous patents, is waiting for hardware acceleration to be common place. What is the current state of h.265 hardware accel? Does it come with everything yet like h.264 does?

View on HN

Most Turing and above Nvidia cards have support for hardware accelerated decode of h.265 [0]. Modern Intel chips also support hardware accelerated decode (support started with Skylake [1]). Not sure about AMD.

[0] https://developer.nvidia.com/video-encode-and-decode-gpu-sup... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quick_Sync_Video#Hardwar...

Right, so that's 2 of the top 10 and 4 of the top 20 gpus per the steam hardware survey, representing 10% of steam users: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

But I don't think desktops are the problem anyway as opposed to laptops/tablets. Desktop cpus are perfectly capable of decoding h265 in real time without acceleration

Looks like most of the cards in the top 20 support H.265 4:2:0 (NVidia 10XX and up), just not 4:4:4 (NVidia 16XX and up).

I don't think the steam hardware survey is a good sample of the wider computer market though - the majority of people using youtube/netflix/etc on x86 devices are probably using Intel laptop chips with integrated graphics, not $500+ dedicated GPUs.

(Although presumably this is probably becoming less true over time, those low end users are moving more and more to mobile devices and smart TVs/chromecast/console, leaving workstation/gaming systems to be a larger percentage of the market)

Actually, Maxwell (9xx) already supports hardware-accelerated H.265 decoding, but on first-gen Maxwell (the higher-end GTX 970/980 at least) it's not pure hardware decoding and didn't work on Linux last I tried.

> But I don't think desktops are the problem anyway as opposed to laptops/tablets

On the Apple end of things, h265 hardware decode has been supported since the A9 (iPhone 6S, introduced 2015)

They also list hardware decode support on Macs as of Intel 6th gen CPUs (Skylake, introduced 2015).

I think basically all of Intel and NVidias current offerings have hardware 265 decode. But AMD GPUs still only do h.264 (which might be a patent thing, or might just be that their target market doesn't really care. I know I don't, my gaming PC is plenty powerful to just software decode H.265 anyway, although the power efficiency gains would be nice)

The mobile market I have no idea about.

EDIT: I was wrong about AMD - see replies.

> But AMD GPUs still only do h.264

Ryzen 4750U on a T14 reporting in:

    vainfo: VA-API version: 1.10 (libva 2.10.0)
    vainfo: Driver version: Mesa Gallium driver 20.3.4 for AMD RENOIR (DRM 3.40.0, 5.11.4-arch1-1, LLVM 11.1.0)
    vainfo: Supported profile and entrypoints
          VAProfileMPEG2Simple            : VAEntrypointVLD
          VAProfileMPEG2Main              : VAEntrypointVLD
          VAProfileVC1Simple              : VAEntrypointVLD
          VAProfileVC1Main                : VAEntrypointVLD
          VAProfileVC1Advanced            : VAEntrypointVLD
          VAProfileH264ConstrainedBaseline: VAEntrypointVLD
          VAProfileH264ConstrainedBaseline: VAEntrypointEncSlice
          VAProfileH264Main               : VAEntrypointVLD
          VAProfileH264Main               : VAEntrypointEncSlice
          VAProfileH264High               : VAEntrypointVLD
          VAProfileH264High               : VAEntrypointEncSlice
          VAProfileHEVCMain               : VAEntrypointVLD
          VAProfileHEVCMain               : VAEntrypointEncSlice
          VAProfileHEVCMain10             : VAEntrypointVLD
          VAProfileHEVCMain10             : VAEntrypointEncSlice
          VAProfileJPEGBaseline           : VAEntrypointVLD
          VAProfileVP9Profile0            : VAEntrypointVLD
          VAProfileVP9Profile2            : VAEntrypointVLD
          VAProfileNone                   : VAEntrypointVideoProc

mpv also reports "Using hardware decoding (vaapi)." when I try to play an HEVC file.

Ah it looks like I was mistaken, they've had h265 encoding and decoding support for a while. Not sure where my brain got this idea from, I even have an AMD gpu atm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Video_Decoder

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Core_Next

How would you if your hardware can or cannot decode h.265? Would it simply not play or might play but stutter, or play in some compromised way?

It would be slow and your laptop would sound like it’s taking off

I have an iPad Mini 2 from 2013. It can play H265 with software decoding, and it doesn't stutter. The only drawback is that the machine gets hot.

Almost all Intel CPU sold in the past 5 years has had an HEVC hardware decoder, and 4 years if you look at HEVC 10.

Most smartphone has also HEVC decode in the past 4 years.

Basically the adoption hurdle has nothing to do with Hardware. Only the two A in FAANG are supportive of JVET or MPEG standard. Others prefer their "patent free" ( cough ) AV1 codec.

Netflix (the N in FAANG) uses device-appropriate codecs and formats, and defaults to AVC (H.264). Googling around shows they provide HEVC (H.265) streams to at least some devices.

Netflix do use HEVC, mostly because there isn't any other solution for high quality 4K streaming in Apple ecosystem. They use it out of absolute necessity. They have been vocal supporter of AV1. And their ex-Head of Video Encoding which now works in Facebook has a distaste for MPEG video, although that is admittedly HEVC and VVC. Everyone seems to be (mildly ) happy with AVC.

Netflix on a recent android mobile showed that the formats supported for hardware decoding are h264 and VP9. So, thought the mobile doesn't have h265 h/w. But then installed mpv from fdroid and played h265 video and mpv said it's using h/w decoding. So for some reason, Netflix chose not to use h265.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com