Sony FMP-X5 4K Media Player does HEVC Netflix and 4K

Nice to see HEVC (h.264's successor) picking up steam.

 

Agreed.

I only hope it's only used for 4:4:4 10 bit and not crappy 4:2:0 tosh like that which YouTube and Shadowplay use. Yuck!

 

that's the least of the problems. It's pretty shallow to complain about color depth and chroma subsampling when the current blu-rays use that and achieve great image quality. Sure, as someone working in the multimedia domain, it's frustrating to see that we can do much more, but it's enough for 99% of users. Only professional graphic cards do 10-bit output (under special circumstances), so you aren't loosing anything, comparatively to PC screens (relatively to the rant on shadowplay). They could use of 10-bit encoding is a better compression rate, though.

I'm more interested in when 4K becomes standard is higher framerate. There isn't enough subjective quality gain on going 4K@24p from simple HD. Also, some movies are just terribly done in post-processing. "Life of Pi" on blu-ray has such a good image quality that it wouldn't surprise me that the first 4K movies will be less impressive than it. Going up to 120Hz content is a must to benefit from 4K. I feel like the current 4K tech is like the whole "HD Ready" period, with bad "exculive" displays that are bad once things become standard.

 

I'm being specific to the codec: it can use 10 bit 4:4:4 under H265 standards and for better compression than H264.

This means sooooooo much better picture quality than that which is currently being used for YouTube and shadowplay, for less bandwidth requirements.

Fraps, btw, uses lossless 4:4:4 and I can see the difference between it, lagrith lossless and shadowplay - not just for motion, but especially for motion.

Streaming services have no excuses, even if they just used this standard for 1080P content, let alone 2160P movies. And Sony? Man, Sony got seriously no excuses for putting an H264 encoder chip on their PS4 mainboard versus an H265 chip. Future proof tech? I think not.

 

my job is on a HEVC decoder (openHEVC), so I'm really aware of it.
DVB is pushing for 4K@120Hz, 10 to 14bit, 4:4:4 videos for 2017. (see this graph : http://www.safe.fr.cr/Temp/Hifi/roadmap DVB.jpg ). I don't think content creators will want to change things as much.

you're comparing an uncompressed bitstream to a compressed one made for real-time streaming (for shadowplay). that's not really fair, as they are both for different uses. Sure, the quality is better on the YUV fraps recording, but you aren't going to stream that easily.

no excuses ? legacy support is a pretty good one if you ask me. Our HEVC decoder has relatively good performance, but FFmpeg hasn't approuved all of our optimization patches (I'm working on it). Needing a multi-core i7 to decode HD @ 60fps is hardly an ideal solution. I think that the first step into HEVC will be through what I call "the bastard SHVC", which is basically an AVC (H.264) base layer (let's say at 1080p) with an HEVC enhanced layer (at 4K), meaning that legacy solutions (all hardware AVC decoders) can read the 1080p layer while the AVC+HEVC decoders can read the full 4K bitstream. I'm calling it "bastard" because it's much better when the base layer is encoded in HEVC.
don't forget that HEVC has been specified a little more than a year ago. AVC is over 10 years old. You'll have to wait for tech to mature, bugs to be squashed, optimizations to be done and chips to be melted before seeing some big dedicated media server. I'd love to see HEVC torrents and such, but the tech is not ready yet.

 

Screw torrents, I want 4:4:4 H265 streaming, codecs and DLC - resolution for the device I'll be using it for.

4:2:0 make me want to puke.

That roadmap graph is ugly btw. It's like the vertical and horizontal axis got switched or got the wrong value on a pie chart.

Should try Office 365 or Adobe. Monochrome is the new multi-colour.

 

what are you waiting to launch your start-up proposing such a service ? If you're serious about pushing a tech like this, it's one of the best ways to be satisfied.

I'm not the one doing the diagrams. I'm the one doing x86 assembly so people can watch streaming 4K videos of cats without it being too much of a burden to CPUs.

 

Less forum browsing and moar coding.