New H.265 twice as efficient as H.264!

[vargo]

Originally Posted by Canada

Does any one know if current Blu ray players can play the new HEVC codec. Is the codec red by the player or can the Blu ray laser read any codec on the disk. If the codec isn't able to be read by the player is it something that could eventually be read if companies did firmware update.

No, existing Bluray players cannot play HEVC.

These players have hardware decoders - ie chips specifically designed to decode H.264, VC-1, etc. They can only do what they were designed to do, and nothing more.

The only possible exception (among Bluray players) is the PS3 which in theory has enough compute power to run a HEVC decoder in software. However this is simply a technical possibility - I don't have any specific information that this is planned and in fact it is quite unlikely.