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

[vargo]

Originally Posted by Penton-Man

Nobody?
Vargo….how bouts an educated guess.

Well you can always do it faster if you throw machines at it. Or dedicated silicon. If we're talking a direct comparison - HEVC software encoding vs H.264 software encoding on the same hardware?

The main problem is that software encoders like x264 are highly configurable.. the slowest x264 preset is dozens of times slower than the fastest. The speed determines the compression efficiency.

Therefore you can already encode x265 faster than x264, if you choose the fastest and slowest presets respectively. Of course it's a rigged test - at the same bitrate, x265 will look much worse, defeating it's purpose.

Unfortunately we're probably going to see vendors do exactly that - use low quality settings to make BS speed claims about their encoder. We're also going to see content providers deliver sub-par HEVC simply because they're not willing to use effective settings (this was often the case with H.264 until quite recently).

HEVC encoding lends itself to parallelisation and that's the direction that computing architectures have been going and will continue to go. So hardware will effectively 'come to' HEVC. I would say in 4 years the machines of the day will probably do what you are asking - ie software encode HEVC at the same speed as the best H.264 encoders while delivering close to the promised efficiency gain.