VLC Media Player Adds Support For H.265 / HEVC

[Artemis3]

Free Software can be sold, you could also resell it if you want, or give it away.

You'd think they'd add support for the open source VP9 first.

The VLC guys make some very strange, often anti-opensource decisions. Like when they made the mobile VLC for iOS first, instead of Android, which got banned by Apple, and made me very happy, because they fully deserved that one (building it for a closed OS like iOS?! What were they thinking?).

Then they ported it to Android, but before it was even fully finished, they started asking money for the "Metro version" (what the hell? Really?).

So yeah, the VLC seem to take some very counter-intuitive decisions for an open source project.

You are quite wrong here, very likely confusing patented codecs with closed software. Software patents are only enforced in about 5 countries, the rest of the world simply ignores that. For example, both lame and x264 are open source projects; and there is an x265 project too.

Also, Free Software (as in FSF) can be compiled to any platform and run for any purpose, and yes, can also be sold; all you need to do is keep the 4 freedoms (ie. provide the source when requested, etc). The fact that the proprietary iOS only allows apps to be installed via their app store is outside VLC. You "could" get the VLC app for iOS and find out "another" way to install it.

Users living in one of those 5 or so software patent oppressed countries are supposed to sort out and purchase licenses for each codec, or the vendor of the software could pay it for them and pass it along the purchase. This is why some linux distros don't include the offending codecs by default, as they don't "sell it" for money, but some distros (ie. Zorin Premium) do and include codecs.

Apple being Apple is probably just adhering to the US centric point of view regarding codecs.

[[Knuckles]]

You'd think they'd add support for the open source VP9 first.

The VLC guys make some very strange, often anti-opensource decisions. Like when they made the mobile VLC for iOS first, instead of Android, which got banned by Apple, and made me very happy, because they fully deserved that one (building it for a closed OS like iOS?! What were they thinking?).

Then they ported it to Android, but before it was even fully finished, they started asking money for the "Metro version" (what the hell? Really?).

So yeah, the VLC seem to take some very counter-intuitive decisions for an open source project.

Don't be silly. It's a few lines of code if you look at the patch, it just hooks up to x265 and that's it. You don't even know if the patch was by a core developer or someone submitted it (open source, remember)?

Also the vlc guys are great. They make one of the most used players for windows, and still work hard on being cross-platform and having support for everyone, instead of just giving in and starting to cut corners and adding lots of windows-only stuff, where probably 99.9% of their userbase is.
So I wouldn't go around accusing them of not being oss-friendly.

[Krysto]

You'd think they'd add support for the open source VP9 first.

The VLC guys make some very strange, often anti-opensource decisions. Like when they made the mobile VLC for iOS first, instead of Android, which got banned by Apple, and made me very happy, because they fully deserved that one (building it for a closed OS like iOS?! What were they thinking?).

Then they ported it to Android, but before it was even fully finished, they started asking money for the "Metro version" (what the hell? Really?).

So yeah, the VLC seem to take some very counter-intuitive decisions for an open source project.

[MWisBest]

It will be interesting to see how x265 stacks up to x264 once it becomes more feature-complete, but as of now I don't think it's far enough along in development to be of that much use.

[xnor]

Sadly, the VLC devs are too stupid to even fix a trivial bug that's been known for ~5 years now.

Switch to German and press H. (The normal hotkey is Ctrl+H.)

[TheLexMachine]

So the question becomes.... is this relevant? I.e., how much cpu does it take to actually decode such a video compared to, say, h264? If its similar or lower, it may be useful, but if its multiples, its useless. Current video decoders won't be able to deal with it, so it will be all up to the cpu.

It depends entirely on the bitrate/quality level and of course the decoding functions that are off-loaded to the GPU (not necessarily the video decoder ASIC built into the GPU). HQ 4K h.265 is out of the question due to bitrate and whatnot but basic 1080P files seem to be easily decoded by CPU alone on a mid-range system.

[[Knuckles]]

This is only encoding support -- is decoding support in already?

[droidhacker]

So the question becomes.... is this relevant? I.e., how much cpu does it take to actually decode such a video compared to, say, h264? If its similar or lower, it may be useful, but if its multiples, its useless. Current video decoders won't be able to deal with it, so it will be all up to the cpu.

[chris200x9]

Title is wrong you put h.264.

[DanL]

Typo in the title... h.264 should be h.265