A Comprehensive Guide on H.265 Codec

What is H.265?

H.265 succeeds H.264 as a video compression codec and is becoming prevalent because of the rapid adoption of 4K content everywhere. Without compromising on video quality, H.265 allows video compression to happen at half the bitrate of its predecessor - H.264 - making it twice as efficient in theory.?

How does it work?

The H.265 codec is based on the same general idea and structure as the previous H.264 standard. As earlier, it has a source video consisting of a series of frames that are encoded (or compressed) by an encoder which results in a compressed bitstream. This compressed bitstream is either stored or shared, and a decoder at the other end decompresses the bitstream to create the original sequence of frames.?

The H.265 encoder carries out a bunch of steps:

• Predicting each unit and performing necessary computations?
• Quantizing and transforming the residual?
• Entropy encoding?

The H.265 decoder then uses entropy decoding to reverse the steps performed during entropy encoding - and extracts the original elements from the sequence and deconstructs the final decoded video image.

H.265/HEVC Overview

The HEVCH.265 (HEVC- High-Efficiency Video Encoding) standard for video compression has the potential to deliver performances far superior to its predecessors like H.264/AVC. While HEVC has the same core structure as AVC and MPEG-2, it also has many incremental and much-needed improvements like increased flexibility of partitioning, greater flexibility in transforming block sizes and prediction modes, better interpolation, and deblocking filters, improved signaling of modes and motion vectors and efficient parallel processing features. All of this cumulatively resulted in a video coding format that offers much better compression without compromising the quality, even for the most high-end video types.

Why H.265 Compression? (Benefits)

Listed below are some of the key benefits of H.265 which will clearly establish how it has managed to outdo its predecessor.

• Provides half the compression ratio of H.264 and supports 64x64 pixel macroblocks, as compared to the 16x16 that was supported by H.264
• Better motion prediction mechanisms lead to an improved compression standard.
• Interframe predictions are more detailed in H.265 than in H.264.?
• Support for resolutions much higher than 8K Ultra High-Definition that is supported by H.264?
• Works on much fewer bit rates as compared to H.264 codecs, thereby making the entire process a lot more efficient.

Conclusion

H.265 picked up on the shortcomings of H.264 Codec and improved on them to provide us with an even better compression standard. Rest assured that we will soon have an even more improved version of this. The goal for you, in such scenarios, should be to stay updated with all the happenings and updates so that you can make the best decision when it comes to choosing a video codec!

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