Support Video Playback for HEVC (H.265) Videos

Comments

9 comments

  • icedterminal

    I came here looking to see if someone else suggested before creating a new idea. Adding support would be greatly beneficial. I prefer to use H265 encoding when I share my clips. I can squeeze in more time under that 8mb limit. Sadly that means friends have to download the clip. Which is annoying. Adding support to have the preview would be awesome. A 13mb clip in H264 looks the same as a 8mb clip in H265. We need preview support. HEVC, VP9 and AV1 are the future. Might as well implement support now for H265.

    > While H.264 is still a very popular codec for video playback and it's great on Discord, HEVC is starting to become the new standard in video encoding and playback.

    I do want to point out something here. While this is true, there are some compatibility issues. Take a look here at the NVENC/NVDEC matrix. The 9xx series GPUs cant decode 420 or 444 color format. The 10xx series GPUs can decode 420, but not 444. This means if you share a video clip to someone who doesn't have the hardware requirements, they will rely on the CPU to decode. This isn't a big deal for many PCs. However, those on the lower end could notice an impact. Budget builds have some good news, AMD was on it before Nvidia was. The RX 5xx series can decode H265 in 420 and 444. VP9 and AV1 are other codecs that don't have much support in older hardware. Among my friends, none of this an issue as we all have hardware than can decode and encode H265.

    > People have mentioned in a previous post regarding difficulties acquiring royalties or licensing for the codec and Electron/Chromium's possible support for HEVC since it's what Discord is built on.

    And that's not true. "HEVC" licensing is only for hardware. Software does not need a paid license. This is how utilities such as handbrake and ffmpeg can encode and decode. These are open source tools.

    > If not, then perhaps royalty-free codecs like AV1 (and in the future, AV2) can be viable options.

    Forget about it. AV1 is only supported on the latest RTX 30xx GPUs from Nvidia and RX 6xxx from AMD. You'd need way more support. All else is CPU bound and can be intensive. Lower end and older CPUs will experience dropped frames as well as 30%+ CPU usage.

    1
  • Gateway

    Not only would this benefit us by letting us watch the higher quality video in discord, it overall reduces the network load discord has to deal with. In the case of nitro subscribers, our video files would be smaller when encoded with h265 vs h264.

    It's a win/win situation.

    6
  • ヌユベ

    I oft have to upload HEVC files to get under the 8MB upload limit, and am continually frustrated that Discord still cannot preview one of the most popular video formats available. Given, H.264 is still extremely popular, but the benefits of HEVC cannot be ignored.

    1
  • Iawooodmypants

    HEVC is now the DEFAULT file saving size on Google Pixel devices. I have limited space on device, and so I had chosen the H.265/HEVC codec as my choice of encoding. But I've had to unselect it as my primary social interactions are on Discord, and so I'm losing space on my phone. Or have to delete a video after I take it, every time. Not ideal.

    Please incorporate this codec into your software asap. Thank you. I sincerely hope you're not keeping it out just encourage people to get Nitro because of bigger file sizes. 

    Other thread with the same request, please upvote both: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360032658392-H-265-Video-Codec-Support

    2
  • Auntibodies

    HEVC encoders other than x265 are generally rubbish when encoding at low bitrates, more efficient than h264 yes but not worth the effort when discord supports vp9 with equally impressive encoding performance as x265.

    Use handbrake to re-encode to webm, vp9 (25-40% bitrate of original clip) & opus audio (40-56kbit @44.1KHz). discord supports without issue.

     

    0
  • UNYU - Cyberstorm64

    the funny thing is, discord does support h265, on mobile devices. 
    and it uses it (for streaming)

    the other thing is, discord doesn't even use the best h264 encoder (x264) 

    if discord added x264 and x265 support (because the cisco h.264 encoder sucks and does not support all the accelerations options) things would be pretty cool. 

    as for licensing, if discord buys their license from MPEG-LA it is $0.40 and has no royalties for publishing. 

    there are also free licenses as well. Then it's just up to the user to get the HEVC video extensions on the Microsoft store. 

    here are some video codecs compared https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_video_codecs

    x264 is the best h264 implementation, and x256 is the best h265 implimentation. both are GNU GPL. 

    Discord could use both of them. 

    Please Discord, Add AV-1 to mobile (for android since iOS doesn't really support it in hardware yet) and h.265 HEVC to Desktop. (As almost everything has hardware hevc support nowadays but only the most recent generation of GPUs (in the high end) support AV1 encoding and decoding in hardware.) 

    For example, my laptop supports HEVC but not AV1 so if I wanna watch a stream it has to be turned into h.264 by discord for me to view it. which takes a lot of resources. h.265 is much better and much more usable. Also HEVC would prevent the “Mosaic Tiles Effect” which is caused by the core of how AVC (that's h.264) works. Additionally HEVC can handle motion better than other codecs. 

    And there are free/low cost implementations of it. You don't have to pay for licensing from the most expensive source.  in terms of paid licensing MPEG has the best and it has no publication royalty. Why not buy it from the people who made it? 

    Please implement HEVC alongside AV-1 and let people pick which one they want to use. 

    Also please let us priview videos and photos encoded using those encoders. 

    Thank You! 

    1
  • Invertex

    Twitter as of this week is now encoding new uploads as HEVC. So Twitter video embeds are now also broken on Discord.

    Can we finally get HEVC support in Discord please?

    0
  • mcsy

    HEVC embeds are now implemented according to July 1 blog. Tested working on a server (I just encoded a sample to HEVC using ffmpeg). VP9 is apparently more efficient though and that's what I usually use. One plus to this is NVENC support, GPU accelerated encoding there is a thing for H.264/H.265/AV1 but not VP9.

    To test

    Command parameters for NVENC HEVC encoding (downscales to 720p and 400k bitrate)

    ffmpeg -y -vsync 0 -hwaccel cuda -hwaccel_output_format cuda -i '.\INPUT.mp4' -vf scale_cuda=1280:720 -c:a copy -c:v hevc_nvenc -b:v 400k '.\OUTPUT.mp4'

    To verify video codec

    ffprobe -v error -select_streams v:0 -show_entries stream=codec_name -of default=noprint_wrappers=1:nokey=1 .\OUTPUT.mp4

    Gives out

    hevc

    Blog post

    https://discord.com/blog/discord-patch-notes-july-1-2024

    0
  • Wesrt

    Thank you so much for this detailed post. I was looking for it and finally got it from here.

    0

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