For years, H.264 has been the go-to video compression standard. Whenever you download a film or TV show, watch a Blu-ray, view HDTV broadcasts, or stream something from various sites and services, there’s a very good chance the video stream you’re watching has been encoded with H.264.
H.264 is a great compression standard for a number of reasons. It provides very good quality at relatively low bitrates, and its widespread use means it’s supported by essentially every video playback device made in the past five to ten years. It’s also very versatile, not only allowing compression to small file sizes, but also to high quality, high bitrate files that are suitable for use on Blu-ray discs.
Adobe Media Encoder 2020 MacOS Free Download Full Version. Free Download Adobe Media Encoder 2020 MacOS Full Version – If you need an encoding or video converting software on Mac, then one of the best options is using this application. From the very beginning of its launch, Media Encoder was mainly functioned to help users to easily export their projects on Mac devices, be it into video. Most 2015 and later Macs. Hardware encoding via VideoToolbox might work on older series GPUs and older. H.264 (VideoToolbox); H.265 (VideoToolbox).
While H.264 is doing a pretty good job of delivering compressed videos to users, there’s a better standard out there that offers similar quality at even smaller file sizes. The standard is called HEVC, or High Efficiency Video Codec, and it first appeared in 2013 as a true successor to H.264. For this reason, HEVC is also known as H.265, or MPEG-H Part 2.
HEVC’s main advantage over H.264 is that it offers roughly double the compression ratio for the same quality. This means that a video file encoded with HEVC can occupy half the space of its H.264 equivalent with no noticeable change in quality, or the same amount of space with improved quality. Sounds pretty good, right?
HEVC is able to compress files to a greater extent than before by evolving upon the H.264 standard. In both of these standards, motion compensated prediction is used to find areas that are redundant within a single frame or in the frames that follow. When redundant blocks of pixels are identified, they are encoded by referencing another area in the same or following frames. In H.264, these blocks can be up to 16x16 pixels in size, but big gains in compression were made by increasing this to 64x64 in HEVC.
Other improvements also help HEVC achieve greater levels of compression, including better variable-block-size segmentation, improved deblocking and motion compensation filters, sample adaptive offset filtering, and better motion vector prediction and precision. This page here from the x265 group has a great explanation of these terms and how it can improve HEVC’s efficiency.
As HEVC is relatively new to the scene, it’s not nearly as compatible with existing playback devices as H.264. Many such devices have dedicated hardware for decoding H.264 streams, while equivalent hardware for decoding HEVC is significantly less common. That’s not to say it’s impossible to decode HEVC on today’s devices – software playback is still possible on a wide variety of hardware, and some hardware decoding solutions exist – but something that can play H.264 is not necessarily HEVC-compatible.
Note: This feature was originally published on 02/16/2016. We have briefly revised it and bumped it because it's as relevant today as it was before (if not more, considering today's broader 4K support). Part of our #ThrowbackThursday initiative.
Hardware Support
Here’s a quick rundown of well-known hardware that includes dedicated HEVC decoding blocks, which definitely support efficient HEVC playback:
- Intel 6th-generation ‘Skylake’ Core processors or newer
- AMD 6th-generation ‘Carizzo’ APUs or newer
- AMD ‘Fiji’ GPUs (Radeon R9 Fury/Fury X/Nano) or newer
- Nvidia GM206 GPUs (GeForce GTX 960/950) or newer
- Other Nvidia GeForce GTX 900 series GPUs have partial HEVC hardware decoding support
- Qualcomm Snapdragon 805/615/410/208 SoCs or newer. Support ranges from 720p decoding on low-end parts to 4K playback on high-end parts.
- Nvidia Tegra X1 SoCs or newer
- Samsung Exynos 5 Octa 5430 SoCs or newer
- Apple A8 SoCs or newer
- Some MediaTek SoCs from mid-2014 onwards
As you can see, most desktop hardware released in 2015, and most mobile hardware from late 2014 onwards, supports dedicated HEVC playback. Hardware designers have been more focused on getting HEVC decoding blocks into mobile hardware first, as the CPUs in these products typically aren’t fast enough for software decoding. Support in desktop hardware has been marginally slower as most desktop-class parts are powerful enough to decode HEVC without dedicated decoding blocks.
If you have a computer or device that doesn’t include the aforementioned hardware, that doesn’t mean you won’t be able to decode HEVC. PCs, even those with entry-level CPUs from several years ago, shouldn’t have much trouble software decoding HEVC videos. One of my HTPCs equipped with a $50 Intel Celeron ‘Ivy Bridge’ CPU from 2012 is more than capable of decoding HEVC, and I’ve even achieved smooth playback on Intel Bay Trail and Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 devices in some circumstances (albeit at high CPU utilization).
As a general rule of thumb, if you have an older PC you’d describe as “very slow” it probably won’t be capable of HEVC playback. Anything else will probably suffice.
Where you won’t find HEVC playback support is in many dedicated media players on the market today. These products either don’t support HEVC hardware decoding, have too low power SoCs to support smooth software playback, or only support a small handful of popular video formats without the ability to run wide format playback software like VLC.
Streaming Boxes and Console Support
Here’s a quick rundown of popular media playing devices that don’t support HEVC:
- Google’s Chromecast (first and second generations)
- Apple TV (although some reports suggest 1080p HEVC playback is possible by running VLC on a 4th-gen model)
- Roku (third-gen models and earlier)
- Amazon Fire TV (2014) and Fire TV Stick
- Any Western Digital WD TV products
- All PlayStation consoles (including PS4 Pro)
- Xbox 360
And here are the media players that do support HEVC:
- Roku 4
- Amazon Fire TV (2015) and 2nd-gen Fire TV Stick
- Xbox One
This isn’t an exhaustive list, but you can clearly see that there’s just a handful of very recent devices that support native HEVC playback. The Xbox One is the only console to support playback, although support for HEVC was added through a software update, presumably utilizing software decoding.
So while the benefits of HEVC encoding are clear, playback is essentially restricted to PCs, high-end smartphones and tablets, and a very small range of media players and consoles. At this point in time, compatibility is a disadvantage to encoding your media library in HEVC.
As for software that can playback HEVC-encoded files, there are many options out there. On Windows 10, you can natively play HEVC videos in the default Films & TV app or through Windows Media Player. Alternatively, you can use VLC or MPC-HC for playback, which support older operating systems, or popular media center apps like Kodi (version 14 onwards) and Plex Media Player.
If you’re running macOS or iOS, VLC is your best bet. On Android devices, you’ll be able to play back HEVC files using MX Player through software decoding if your device is fast enough, or if it is, both MX Player and the Plex app supports native HEVC playback. Note that some devices have HEVC decoding blocks in their SoCs but don’t support native playback at this time.
Hello guys,
I'll share with you today, a reply I made to a thread on Overclockers.uk on hardware accelerated video encoding on both Windows and Linux, using free software only.
Here was the solution I proposed, copied word for word, as it may be of help to someone here:
I'd strongly recommend the following solutions, based on personal experience:
First, on Windows:
1. VidCoder & VidCoder beta: (Best installed side-by-side because the Beta gets updated faster). Upstream URL: https://vidcoder.codeplex.com/ . Features: Based on Handbrake's engine, can utilize Intel QuickSync and it's user interface has more flexible options than HB. For instance, you can enable file size limits where the app will calculate average and maximum bitrate for your output file, and even do two-pass encodes with Intel QuickSync hardware acceleration. Pretty awesome! Ideal for beginners and intermediate users. Link to software page.
2. StaxRip: This is a minimalist approach with a basic UI and a wide variety of tools that allow for a wide selection of hardware encoders on demand. For instance, StaxRip packs QSVEnc (For Intel QuickSync), NVENC ( for H.264 & H.265 hardware accelerated encoding on supported Maxwell Gen 2 GPUs) and other tools. Very versatile and minimalistic, ideal for advanced users familiar with codec parameters. Here's their project page.
3. MediaCoder: This is an all-in-one encoder with a vast support for many formats. Google it. Problems: Nagware for the free edition. However, very functional and well polished, ideal for intermediate and expert users. NVIDIA NVENC, CUDA, and Intel's QuickSync are fully supported. (For CUDA, use an older driver prior to R337. NVENC only available on Maxwell Gen 1 and above). Here's the project's home page.
4. Hybrid: What I said about StaxRip can also be said of Hybrid Media Encoder. However, Hybrid requires initial configuration (Output directory) BEFORE it can be used as this setting is left blank on first use. Also, Hybrid has no hand-holding, and it assumes that the user is an EXPERT on all aspects, including codec tuning options and selected container formats. Of note is it';s excellent job queue system that allows you to run as many jobs in parallel as possible, and can be changed ON THE FLY. Get it from here.
5. Xmedia Recode: Perhaps one of the most advanced software packages out there, it also allows two-pass VBR encodes with NVIDIA NVENC and supports a wide variety of video codecs. Intel's QuickSync is also fully supported. Here's the project's home page.
6. A's Video Converter: Perhaps one of the smallest and most versatile encoders out there, it supports all known hardware accelerated encoders on Windows, from NVIDIA's NVENC, Intel's QuickSync to AMD's VCE on compatible hardware. As an extra bonus, on multi-GPU systems, one can also select the GPU device to be used per acceleration option. The author also includes optional integration with the Bluesky Video capture for screen casting and in-game recording. See the project page here.
Secondly, on Linux:
First, I assume that you can competently use the distribution of your choice, and that you can install and manage software on the rig from both the terminal and graphical installers.
Carrying on, a few notes:
1. Some distributions (Fedora and Ubuntu) offer third party repositories (such as Negativo's repo on Fedora for NVIDIA NVENC enabled ffmpeg and driver packages) that make it easy to install these encoders. Do your research and carry on.
2. Ensure your GPU drivers are up to date.
Ff12 zodiac age download. Now, to the sweet spot:
1. Hybrid Encoder: This awesome tool is also available on Linux, and currently, supports offloading some portions of H.264 encode (via x264) with OpenCL support. At the moment, this will accelerate lookahead function in x264 and the performance boost is moderate. YMMV depending on your hardware. As tested, this works on all major OpenCL ICDs out there (NVIDIA, AMD with the fglrx driver, and Intel's OpenCL via the Beignet project). This also works with the opensource OpenCL stacks on Linux such as pocl and the Mesa LLVM OCL backend.
2. TraGtor: This is an ffmpeg and Libav frontend. On Linux, it will support any video format and encoder that ffmpeg recognises, and gives a drop-down menu that allows for codec selection. In this case, install ffmpeg 2.4.5+ or libav with NVIDIA NVENC support (see Negativo's Fedora repo or compile from source on other distributions; Arch Linux has ffmpeg-nvenc in AUR) and select nvenc ( or h264/h265-nvenc) under codec options in TraGtor, depending on your hardware. Note that H.265 is only supported on Maxwell GM200,GM206 and Pascal's GP104 microarchitecture SKUs for now.
3. Use ffmpeg or libav directly from the commandline. See notes on (2) for using NVENC SIP Block on Linux, and tune your encode parameters with the correct encoder (nvenc , libnvenc, etc) as is needed.
Notes on AMD GCN1.0+ hardware: On Linux, AMD VCE 1.0 & 2.0 are supported on the newer AMDGPU driver via OpenMAX IL.
You can now configure libav and ffmpeg with the --enable-omx flag and you'll get the hardware-accelerated H.264 encoder offloading H.264 transcode to the VCE block via the h264_omx encoder (as selected on runtime). Note that the Raspberry Pi 's Broadcom-based GPU can also offload H.264 encoding via OpenMAX too.
At the moment, OpenMAX IL is also exposed via gstreamer, so any gstreamer based encoder can utilize this technology on supported platforms.
For Mac OSX:
You can now configure and build FFmpeg with videotoolbox enablement.
Check this out for the encoder options:
Output:
And for H.264/AVC encoding, see the supported options by running:
Then tune the respective encoders as you see fit.
More on videotoolbox: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/videotoolbox
As you can see, it taps into the hardware-based encoders available on Mac OSX, offering a unified API for video encoding across multiple abstractions (Intel's QuickSync on supported Intel IGPs, etc). Grab a build here: https://evermeet.cx/ffmpeg/
I hope I've helped.
Regards,
Brainiarc7