[IDEA] HEVC/.265 on Xbian

[syco]

Hi guys,

I see a lot of new movies/series are encoded with
HEVC/x265 ... but Xbian does not play this up to
now. I always can hear the sound only, but no
image/video.

Is there a way to implement it or are you doing
that within the next release or is there a problem
in general, which prevents our Pi to play it at all?

Thank you for your help/information.

[rikardo1979]

(19th Nov, 2014 10:01 PM)syco Wrote:  Hi guys,

I see a lot of new movies/series are encoded with
HEVC/x265 ... but Xbian does not play this up to
now. I always can hear the sound only, but no
image/video.

Is there a way to implement it or are you doing
that within the next release or is there a problem
in general, which prevents our Pi to play it at all?

Thank you for your help/information.

well, do not expect much from little RPi...dont expect to support all the files, especially the new ones with really high bitrates

[syco]

Oh, I thought, as those files are really small, the
codec would be an easy to handle type.

What a pity, it will not work on our Xbian Pi. :\

[rikardo1979]

(20th Nov, 2014 03:41 AM)syco Wrote:  Oh, I thought, as those files are really small, the
codec would be an easy to handle type.

What a pity, it will not work on our Xbian Pi. :\

its not about the size of the file, its about the codec and specially about bitrate. dont be confused here

[menakite]

H.265 can't be hardware decoded, but support for it will be in Helix (XBMC/Kodi v14). You still won't be able to play any actual movie as the CPU is not up to it.
Low low low quality ones, the ones you'll never watch, will work fine though :-)

[syco]

Haha, shit ... so, what is coming next after our lovely Pi?

[menakite]

Well, technically "low quality" is much subjective. I'm sure for me it won't really work, but it's possible that it works for you...
I have my doubts, but we'll see if the CuBox-i is any better for this (still software decoding for H.265).

[rikardo1979]

@syco as @menakite mentioned, if you don't have HW decoding, dont expect much from ARM CPUs, what ever kind on this micro computers.
If you really want something like this than you are on wrong address, and you should get a decent HTPC for few hundred £££

[syco]

Yeah, I see, those ARM CPUs are not the
strongest suit for such tasks (software
decoding).

... and btw, I really love my two Pis with
Xbian on it.

It would be just nice to have a RPi with
some more CPU power.

[f1vefour]

(21st Nov, 2014 06:00 AM)syco Wrote:  Yeah, I see, those ARM CPUs are not the
strongest suit for such tasks (software
decoding).

... and btw, I really love my two Pis with
Xbian on it.

It would be just nice to have a RPi with
some more CPU power.

I suggest something x86 for horsepower.

[mk01]

@syco

-alsa version of xbmc "should" be able to play such files. "should" means to open them and decode technically, no idea what the poor Broadcom SOC can handle to decode in realtime.

the "RPI native" XBMC (playing via OMXPLAYER) can play only formats whose GPU can HW decode. it doesn't contain any code to handle SW decoding. despite -alsa version where XBMC's native players are able to use OMX lib hw decoding but they also natively fallback to SW (via FFMPEG).

(-alsa is also the only possibility how to play old divx3 content and probably others - sometimes the RPI SOC is enough for low-res videos - for instance my Red Dwarf collection in divx3 with resolution not higher than 320x200 - but hi res or not, it's still funny ) )

---

just tried some x265 demos in xbmc (macosx) and it looks like 13.2 doesn't support 265 at all.

@menakite
do you know if 14 supports that ?

[syco]

Ah, thanks a lot for that technical insight. Now I
understand a bit more of all that stuff.

[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.

[syco]

Great, really exciting news. I have to update now to RC 3, at least.

For some reason, my Pi stays on RC 2, although I enter:

apt-get clean; apt-get update; apt-get upgrade

Weird.

[syco]

(22nd Nov, 2014 11:56 AM)f1vefour Wrote:  I suggest something x86 for horsepower.

Btw, I just checked that Fire TV ... and well, this
baby really has the word "horse power" branded
into its case. At least, the reviews talk high words
of it.

Xbian on that box would be just the nicest thing,
I guess.