8K HEVC Video Will Come Sooner Than we Expected
Apple claimed their intention to support HEVC/H.265 video codec at WWDC 2017 as a solution for the future HTTP live streaming. Flussonic, the media streaming professionals, implemented HEVC support into their video delivery software solutions by the end of 2014, so at the time of the Apple announcement, it was supported out-of-the-box.
Apple did a similar assertion earlier in 2010 to support HTML5 in favor of Flash. It boosted the open-source web standard development and HTML5 is commonly used in the Internet now. Therefore, we can consider that HEVC will become very popular pretty soon.
WHAT IS HEVC?
High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), also known as H.265 and MPEG-H Part 2. It’s the new successor to Advanced Video Coding (AVC), also known as H.264, which is one of the compression schemes used by Blu-ray.
The idea of HEVC is to offer the same level of picture quality as AVC, but with better compression, so there’s less data to deal with. This is key if we want 4K/Ultra HD broadcasts (including satellite), 4K Blu-rays, and more.
Why HEVC
The current common video codec is H264, and it’s supported by the most web browsers and devices, while HEVC is supported by a number of new devices and operating systems. What’s the point to use HEVC? It offers 1.5x better compression ratio with the same quality and can deliver 4K and 8K videos more effectively using the same connection speeds.
Brighter, larger, slighter — it is the motto of video market in the near future.
HEVC is used on Earth and in space
Right now, the most IPTV services and CDN networks provide H264-encoded .mp4 video files to end users. HEVC is used for sending larger video files between servers of the CDN network to save traffic. After that, all HEVC videos are encoded back to H264 for better support by all devices.As CDN specialists mentioned, the new video standard is used for transport functions at the point.
HEVC/H.265 codec is currently at the edge of the digital technology. A good evidence is that it’s used beyond our planet’s surface by satellites with stationary orbits around Earth.
Who supports HEVC
A few companies, including Apple support the new video codec. Akamai CDN supports this video standard for better transport reasons.
As Max Lapshin, Flussonic CEO, said: “We strive to support the newest and most perspective technology that tend to improve the life quality and certain services. It’s always a risk to invest in a new technology. As it turned out, we were on the right track when we added HEVC support to our video delivery services in 2016. Now it’s supported in both HLS и в DASH”.
It’s still the right time to invest in HEVC development, because there is no doubt that it will become a common standard in a few years from now.