Telestream has announced the availability of a new open source High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) H.265 encoder.
The so-called “x265 project” is looking to create the world’s most efficient, highest quality H.265 codec. The x265 project was co-founded and is being managed by Telestream’s development partner, MulticoreWare.
HEVC is a video compression standard, a successor to H.264/MPEG-4 AVC (Advanced Video Coding) that was jointly developed by the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG).
HEVC is said to double the data compression ratio compared to H.264/MPEG-4 AVC at the same level of video quality. It can alternatively be used to provide substantially improved video quality at the same bit rate. It can support 8K UHD and resolutions up to 8192 x 4320.
The first version of the standard was completed and published earlier this year. Several extensions to the technology remain under active development, including range extensions (supporting enhanced video formats), scalable coding extensions and 3-D video extensions.
The Telestream H.265 initiative is being introduced under both an open source and commercial license model. “Telestream and Multicoreware have had great success in the acceleration and commercial deployment of x264 and believe that a similar approach with the collaborative development of the next generation of high-efficiency codecs will benefit the industry,” said Shawn Carnahan, CTO at Telestream.
“The x264 project proved the effectiveness of developing a codec of this complexity. Leveraging the x264 technology in this new project will ensure that the new codec is as robust, efficient and high quality as its predecessor,” Carnahan added.
The company said a previous collaboration between Telestream and MulticoreWare led to successful work on the GPU acceleration of x264, a task deemed by many to be incredibly difficult to achieve.
Interested individuals and companies are encouraged to contribute to the project and are invited to learn more at x265.org. As an open source project, access is free under GNU LGPL licensing, and commercial licenses are available for companies wishing to use the resulting implementation in their products.
Telestream will demonstrate HEVC transcoding at the International Broadcasters Convention (IBC) in Amsterdam, Sept. 13-17 in stand 7.C12.
