Introduction

Increasing demand for high definition and ultra-high definition video, along with an increasing desire for video on demand has led to exponential growth in demand for bandwidth and storage requirements. These challenges can be met by the new High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard, also known as H.265. The x265 HEVC encoder project was launched by MulticoreWare in 2013, aiming to provide the most efficient, highest performance HEVC video encoder.

About HEVC

The High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) was developed by the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG), through their Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC). HEVC is also known as ISO/IEC 23008-2 MPEG-H Part 2 and ITU-T H.265. HEVC provides superior video quality and up to twice the data compression as the previous standard (H.264/MPEG-4 AVC). HEVC can support 8K Ultra High Definition video, with a picture size up to 8192x4320 pixels.

About x265

The primary objective of x265 is to become the best H.265/HEVC encoder available anywhere, offering the highest compression efficiency and the highest performance on a wide variety of hardware platforms. The x265 encoder is available as an open source library, published under the GPLv2 license. It is also available under a commercial license, enabling commercial companies to utilize and distribute x265 in their solutions without being subject to the restrictions of the GPL license.

x265 is developed by MulticoreWare, leaders in high performance software solutions, with backing from leading video technology providers including Telestream and Doremi Labs (and other companies who want to remain anonymous at this time), and with contributions from open source developers. x265 leverages many of the outstanding video encoding features and optimizations from the x264 AVC encoder project.

The x265 software is available for free under the GNU GPL 2 license, from https://bitbucket.org/multicoreware/x265. For commercial companies that wish to distribute x265 without being subject to the open source requirements of the GPL 2 license, commercial licenses are available with competitive terms. Contact license @ x265.com to inquire about commercial license terms.

While x265 is primarily designed as a video encoder software library, a command-line executable is provided to facilitate testing and development. We expect x265 to be utilized in many leading video hardware and software products and services in the coming months.