Intel's Open-Source H.265/HEVC Encoder Sees First Release Of 2020

Intel's Scalable Video Technology team is known for their open-source video encoder work particularly on AV1 and VP9 formats, but they also continue to maintain a high performance H.265/HEVC encoder as well. Intel SVT-HEVC 1.5 was released on Monday as their first major update of the year.

Intel SVT-HEVC 1.5 fixes "all memory leaks" following a refactoring of their allocation/deallocation code that also leads to the ability for FFmpeg to run multi-instance encoding in parallel. SVT-HEVC 1.5 also has a number of optimizations, fixes for a random hang issue with few threads (something we've seen as well with SVT-HEVC in our own benchmarks), and a number of other fixes.

The SVT-HEVC GStreamer plug-in was also upstreamed earlier this year into GStreamer's gst-plugins-bad, leading to the local copy of the plug-in set to be removed soon from the source tree.

More details on SVT-HEVC 1.5 via GitHub.