VLC Media Player Adds Support For H.265 / HEVC

The VLC project has merged support for x265 to provide support for HEVC/H.265 in the popular open-source cross-platform media player.

Earlier this year the ITU approved the H.265 / HEVC Video Codec as a big upgrade over H.264/MPEG-4 AVC. High Efficiency Video Coding only needs half the bit-rate of H.264 while providing better video quality and support for 8K UHD resolutions. Since then the x265 project was started as an open-source H.265 encoder.

More recently, libde265 came about as another open-source H.265 implementation that's written from scratch.

With a Git commit made to VLC today and detected by Anzwix, there's now the x265 encoder code living within the media player's source tree. The VLC support for H.265 High Efficiency Video Coding for now is hidden behind the --enable-x265 configure switch at build time.