Video Breakthroughs

Vantrix today officially launched their open source HEVC project website, f265.org. The f265 project was previously announced as an open source version of the H.265 encoder, also known as High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). The project aims to accelerate the industry-wide development and adoption of H.265 through a collaborative and free open source model. The project website is now officially available for researchers and commercial entities to obtain the source code and contribute to the refinement and evolution of the code to accelerate the implementation of both software and hardware systems.

Vantrix’s f265 encoder will be licensed under the OSI BSD terms, enabling access to source code, free redistribution, and derived works. The project will target both high quality offline and real-time encoding.

“The f265.org site is maintained by and for developers to help accelerate the development and adoption of HEVC,” noted Francis Labonte, Vantrix research lab director. “We have a working baseline version available that we’ve been demonstrating for UHD/4k live streaming and now want to take the real-time performance and feature set to the next level. We’re hoping to contribute to accelerating the industry transition from H.264 to H.265 and solving network bandwidth issues for high definition video.”

ces265 is a "High Efficiency Video Coding" (HEVC) software written in C++ with multi-threading support. This software compresses the raw video stream in YUV 4:2:0 planar format into HEVC 8.0 compatible bitstream. Help is taken from HM-8.0, HM-9.2 and x265 software while writing this software.

FFmpeg and its forked Libav have each added an H.265 / HEVC encoder today to their respective code-bases. 

Going back to the middle of last year there's been the open-source x265 project for implementing the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) video format that succeds H.264/MPEG-4 AVC. We have also seen open-source HEVC / H.265 support come via libde265 as a decoder for this video format that doubles the data compression ratio of H.264 while at the same video quality level. 

ATEME has announced what it says is the industry’s first open source implementation of a software media player supporting High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). The implementation is available immediately. Service providers and broadcasters are able to accelerate experimentation of the new HEVC Codec standard in the field thanks to this development, the company says.

GPAC is an open source media player that can be used to playback live or file-based audio and video content and also to encapsulate and transmit such content as a stream. Those functionalities are now extended to files or streams encoded with HEVC, the latest video compression format standardized by ITU as H.265. GPAC has been validated with a 1080p High Definition content delivery chain. Work is now ongoing to extend the use cases to Ultra High Definition.