[IDEA] HEVC/.265 on Xbian

[menakite]

(27th Nov, 2014 03:41 AM)mk01 Wrote:  @menakite
do you know if 14 supports that ?

Helix supports software decoding of H.265. There was not much to do in XBMC/Kodi itself, it was just that FFMpeg didn't support H.265 - it's now upgraded to 2.4.3.

As you gave a few details, let me do the same for the upcoming v14.

In Helix DVDPlayer and OMXPlayer were merged: there's only one player now, DVDPlayer.
In settings "DVDPlayer" refers to "software decoding" while "OMXPlayer" refers to "hardware decoding" (the name "OMXPlayer" was kept to avoid confusing people who otherwise would think that OMXPlayer was removed - but there's only one player).

DVDPlayer (i.e. software decoding) is also MMAL accelerated (it's configurable).
So, in Helix you enable "MMAL acceleration" (accelerates software decoding via MMAL API) and "OMXPlayer acceleration" (GPU decoding). These are the optimal settings: it first checks if the video can be decoded by the GPU, if it can't it will then transparently fall back to software decoding, either MMAL accelerated (if the setting is enabled) or plain software decoding.
Previously you had to manually select the player via "Play with..." otherwise OMXPlayer silently exited, or you only got audio but no video.
Software decoding via MMAL acceleration is pretty acceptable, it can play (*low*) bit rate 1080p videos pretty fine. (Of course GPU decoding gives the best experience.)

Side note: E-AC3 passthrough on the Pi wasn't working at all and that's also fixed in Helix.

Edit: couple things I forgot. Audio can now be resampled on the GPU - this gives perfect audio quality - and ALSA support was pushed upstream.