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HEVC (H.265) Executive Summary and Playback

I. Primary information of HEVC (H.265)

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) jointly developed by the ISO/IEC and ITU-T is a video compression format, a successor to H.264/MPEG-4 AVC (Advanced Video Coding). The first version of the standard was completed and published in January 2013.

II. How It HEVC (H.265) Works

Like H.264 and MPEG-2, HEVC uses three frame types, I-, B- and P-frames within a group of pictures, incorporating elements of both inter-frame and intraframe compression. However, HEVC incorporates numerous advances, including:

1. Coding Tree Blocks:
H.264: macroblocks with a maximum size of 16x16
HEVC: coding tree blocks, or CTBs, with a maximum size of 64x64 pixels.

Tip: Larger block sizes are more efficient when encoding larger frame sizes, like 4K resolution.

15547-hevc-1.jpg

2. More intra-prediction directions:
H.264: 9 intra prediction directions
HEVC : over 35, adding more potential reference pixel blocks that fuel more efficient intra-frame compression. (The obvious cost is the additional encoding time required to search in the additional directions.)
15548-hevc-2.jpg

III. Quality of HEVC (H.265) compared with H.264

It is said to double the data compression ratio compared to H.264/MPEG-4 AVC at the same level of video quality. For the entertainment-related comparisons, the study encoded multiple clips ranging in resolution from 832x480 (480p) to 1920x1080 (1080p). For the PSNR-related tests, the study encoded files using four different technologies, HEVC, H.264, MPEG-4 and H.263, until all files had the same PSNR value. Click Here to learn more information about HEVC(H.265).

IV. Necessary solution of HEVC (H.265)

From the above analysis, we can easily conclude that HEVC (H.265) videos are a little different from H.264 files. It seems that it is not so friendly with players and editing tools on Windows&Mac. So if you want to play H.265 with VLC, QuickTime, Plex; edit H.265 in Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro or upload H.265 to YouTube and more, you need to find a professional converter to transcode it first.

With the help of Brorsoft Video Converter, a professional third party program to deal with HEVC (H.265) videos, you not only can reformt HEVC (H.265) videos to AVI, WMV, MOV, MP4, for eadily playing, but also can convert HEVC (H.265) files to the editing tools with professional codec, like MPEG for Premiere, DNxHD for Avid, .etc.

Tip: For Mac users, Brorsoft Video Converter Mac is specially designed for dealing with HEVC (H.265) for playing and editing on Mac(macOS Sierra included)

Related Guides:
MP4 File Extension Details and Tips
AVI File Extension Details and Tips
MKV File Extension Details and Tips

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