[beachgardener]

It would not surprise me if Pentax brought out 4K into DSLR with H.265, maybe with some proprietary software (I hear VLC works to). My question is about hardware.
At this point in time, today if we needed it, what computer hardware would we need?

I understand that Nvidia have two graphics cards with support, the 960 and 950, not sure what AMD are doing, and maybe Intel Skylake brings in support too. So would we need and i5 or would an i3 do? Or will we all need i7? Or even Pentium or Celeron. Would we need 8 or 16Gb of ram. SSD's would help I suppose. Would the AMD FM2+ be enough, A10, A8?

Well you get the idea, what are the encoding/decoding system requirements for H.265? I understand that we will be needing faster computers, well some of us will.

I ask as my good computer hardware is not up to it, I came across a H.265 file and it would not play even with capable packages. Had to recode it to mkv for it to work, even then I had to play it on my good computer (not good enough apparently) for that mkv to play. All other usual mkv's play no problems.

Thank you regards beachgardener.

[Hank]

Surprisingly little horse power is required to encode & decode H.265, any computer from the last 10 years will mange, certainly anything within the last 5.
Hardware acceleration of the decoding is useful, but only with edge cases (you're not re-encoding 50 years of ABC TV are you?), certainly more memory is useful (but can your OS use the extra RAM), faster IO is always better, but for a home user, you'll get by.

As you pointed out VLC does a good job with both; I would stick with it as the preferred playback tool.

For what it's worth, reading the user manual for the K-1, page 119, the movie recording format is MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 (MOV).
Of course, on the flip side, Apple is End Of Life QuickTime on Windows PCs.

[beachgardener]

In the screen shot says my current computer specs, bottle neck at the cpu there I did have a GT 250 but recently I was given a 760.

I did also try Chrome with the app HEVC player it said computer too slow, not until I recoded it did it play with that or VLC. Can’t help but think that computer specs. play a part. I think the video may have been from a Sony camera, but not certain.
Isn't there stuff like certain CPU instruction sets that would be required ie. SSE*?

[Steve.Ledger]

Of course, on the flip side, Apple is End Of Life QuickTime on Windows PCs.

Which has absolutely nothing to do with H.264 encoding in .mov containers for the PC.
All that is necessary with the Quicktime issue is to disable the plugin in your web browsers.

[Hank]

You actually have better specs than I do; the fact that you're running Mint can pose a few technical issues.
I would try to re-install / update the H.265 libraries.

[beachgardener]

update the H.265 libraries.

yes did that yesterday.

[Snakeisthestuff]

Surprisingly little horse power is required to encode & decode H.265, any computer from the last 10 years will mange, certainly anything within the last 5.
Hardware acceleration of the decoding is useful, but only with edge cases (you're not re-encoding 50 years of ABC TV are you?), certainly more memory is useful (but can your OS use the extra RAM), faster IO is always better, but for a home user, you'll get by.

As you pointed out VLC does a good job with both; I would stick with it as the preferred playback tool.

For what it's worth, reading the user manual for the K-1, page 119, the movie recording format is MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 (MOV).
Of course, on the flip side, Apple is End Of Life QuickTime on Windows PCs.

I am pretty sure you are mixing up H.265 (HEVC) and H.264.
"Almost" everything today is encoded in H.264 (also 4k material like youtube), because there is wide support for hardware encoding / decoding.
This is not the case for H.265, I believe the Skylake CPUs were the first to fully support hardware encoding + decoding and it is implemented therefore into typical encoder's like ffmpeg atm, if not even already done (not up to date here).
Otherwise you might need a dedicated graphics card which has the hardware decoding support.

H.265 content is still slowly showing up, in 4k BRs for example (which is why you need a new BR-player for your TV which can hardware decode that stuff).

The advantage of H.265 is smaller file with same quality encoding, but this costs hardware ressources for encoding and decoding. Thats why we need the special CPU instructions to speed this up. Do not even mention H.265 10bit encoding (usually we use 8bit atm), this is even worse.

If you want to test your PC, play the 4k "sintel" file in 4k and watch your CPU usage :
Downloads ? Videos » libde265 HEVC ? H.265 High Efficiency Video Coding

BTW: Anybody remembers trying to play DVDs on PC without hardware-acceleration in the early days ?

[surfar]

Windows 10 will play H.265 files, my NX500 shoots that codec but its too new atm.Eventually it will become normal.H264 has been around for a looooong time.


Rocky Mountain is recommended to convert .

[Snakeisthestuff]

In the screen shot says my current computer specs, bottle neck at the cpu there I did have a GT 250 but recently I was given a 760.

I did also try Chrome with the app HEVC player it said computer too slow, not until I recoded it did it play with that or VLC. Can’t help but think that computer specs. play a part. I think the video may have been from a Sony camera, but not certain.
Isn't there stuff like certain CPU instruction sets that would be required ie. SSE*?

To answer your question, if you want CPU accelerated H.265 decoding you need an Intel Core processor of the 6th generation.
See: https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2015/12/11/codecs-are-they-slowing-you-down

The cheapest solution could be an i3 6100 for example. I would recommend to look also for a core i5 6600, this CPU is more future proof. You will need a new motherboard for this CPU (Socket 1151, be sure to check its compatible with your DDR3 RAM or you will need new RAM also).
As you mentioned, the Geforce GTX 960 would be also an option, but it has only H.265 decoding not encoding (only helps for watching H.265, not for content creation).

If this is too expensive you could try to get a cheap used i5 / i7 for your board on ebay and use sheer CPU power for the H.265 decoding. This will be most probably ok, as long as you do not do other CPU heavy tasks in the background. Never checked on this, so you might google a bit and of course this will help not as much for encoding (content creation) as an i5 6600 with encoding acceleration.

[surfar]

Snakey, the 4th generation i5 4200 decodes H265(that's how I view my 4K footage), and when I bought my NX500 I read that the gtx 960 both decodes and encodes H265.the 970 and 980 don't do both.I cant exactly remember where I gained that info but I looked at a few places and that was the result.???
just did a quick google search and this link was the first that appeared


https://googleads.g.doubleclick.net/aclk?sa=l&ai=CZCw99JcUV6DjEYWzvATSp7SoCu...://gounzip.com

[beachgardener]

To answer your question, if you want CPU accelerated H.265 decoding you need an Intel Core processor of the 6th generation.
See: https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2015/12/11/codecs-are-they-slowing-you-down

The cheapest solution could be an i3 6100 for example. I would recommend to look also for a core i5 6600, this CPU is more future proof. You will need a new motherboard for this CPU (Socket 1151, be sure to check its compatible with your DDR3 RAM or you will need new RAM also).
As you mentioned, the Geforce GTX 960 would be also an option, but it has only H.265 decoding not encoding (only helps for watching H.265, not for content creation).

If this is too expensive you could try to get a cheap used i5 / i7 for your board on ebay and use sheer CPU power for the H.265 decoding. This will be most probably ok, as long as you do not do other CPU heavy tasks in the background. Never checked on this, so you might google a bit and of course this will help not as much for encoding (content creation) as an i5 6600 with encoding acceleration.

Thank you for that information. Yes mainly for decoding/viewing rather than encoding, but still I was thinking i5 6500, yes will need new board and ram. For viewing only I wonder if we could get away with an i3 6th gen. and maybe a Nvidia 960/950? Or would the 6th Gen cpu take care of it alone?
Anyway just a foray into the specifications to see what we will need in the near future in terms of computing power. I like desktop computers and will look over the coming months for what I will need to build it. Also see what processors come out, Kaby Lake and other Lakes Intel 2016 Desktop CPU Roadmap Leaked - Kaby Lake-S, 10 Core Broadwell-E and Apollo Lake Processors Confirmed

Thank you all for the responses to this thread.

surfar, do you have the 960 with that i5 4200?
that gounzip doesn't work for me.

[surfar]

Beachy, its just the integrated graphics.You only need windows 10 to view H265, it will decode.You need gtx960 for encoding, just do a google search, theres plenty of info.

[beachgardener]

yes no worries thanks, I use LinuxMint, so yes I suppose all I need is the appropriate cpu (and relevant hardware), I usually use nvidia graphics on my good computer for image editing as I like the look on my screen, and up to date VLC and all will be good.

[kadajawi]

Surprisingly little horse power is required to encode & decode H.265, any computer from the last 10 years will mange, certainly anything within the last 5.
Hardware acceleration of the decoding is useful, but only with edge cases (you're not re-encoding 50 years of ABC TV are you?), certainly more memory is useful (but can your OS use the extra RAM), faster IO is always better, but for a home user, you'll get by.

As you pointed out VLC does a good job with both; I would stick with it as the preferred playback tool.

For what it's worth, reading the user manual for the K-1, page 119, the movie recording format is MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 (MOV).
Of course, on the flip side, Apple is End Of Life QuickTime on Windows PCs.

I have a Intel Core i5, overclocked to 4.5 GHz. Yes, it's an Ivy Bridge, but it still kicks ass. And nope, it will not play the Samsung NX-1 files. It doesn't even get close to being able to play it. It's like a 2 fps slideshow. Yes, at 1080p my computer can play all h265 files, but at 4K? No chance. I doubt that the latest i7 -E processor could play it in software.

Windows 7 will also play back h265, if not natively, then simply install MPC-HC (which is vastly superior to VLC IMHO, using a better, more optimized decoder, having a better UI and better image quality too.

I'd go with the i5... ideally an overclocked one. Don't you want to edit the files, too?

Btw., I highly doubt we will see a 4K HEVC Pentax within the next 2-3 years. Maybe it'll be 5 years before we'll see that.

[surfar]

Ricoh have 4K in the WG-M2,so your time frames aren't relevant I'm afraid.It will transition into the ilc genre sooner than later.