HEVC (H.265) coming to macOS High Sierra

Channels Apple TV
#1

Apple announced that they will be supporting H.265 in its new Mac operating system macOS High Sierra available now to developers, in late June this year in public beta and in October this year as a public grneral release.

I mention this as a point of interest as I presume that there will be new Apple TV's to support this video standard. HEVC broadcasts are gradully being implemented in Europe, notably Germany & France.

Other notes are that Apple are moving heavily into VR. It won't be long before TV is In VR also.

Sources

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVB-T2

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding

https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/

#2

No updates were announced regarding tvOS or Apple TV hardware, so we will have to wait and see…

#3

Looks like tvOS 11 will indeed have HEVC hardware decoding!

New in tvOS 11.0 - Support for High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC).

  • High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is a new standard for video encoding that offers substantially better compression than H.264 at the same level of visual quality.
  • Use AV Foundation to playback movies containing HEVC encoded tracks, and to export videos.
  • VideoToolbox clients can encode and decode HEVC video bitstreams.
1 Like
#4

Theoretically, what would this mean for Channels?

#5

Better support for DVB-T2 broadcasts in Germany, which have all recently switched over to HEVC. At the moment, these are unwatchable on the Apple TV.

#6

Could we see HEVC transcoding for web/iOS viewing?

#7

Yes the DVR could add an HEVC transcoding option once we figure out how this stuff works on macOS 10.13

#9

More info on HEVC for video & HEIF for photo interagration into the Apple ecosystem.

Apple WWDC 2017 Developer Presentation
Introducing HEIF and HEVC

#10

I know it’s still early, but any way to estimate what type of CPU/GPU would be required for hardware/software transcoding for HEVC?