HEVC/H.265 file extensions not recognized

[vidrep]

FFmpeg has implemented support for HEVC/H.265 decoding since October 2013. It would be nice to see this format supported in Haiku.

[pulkomandy]

do you have a link to a sample file for testing?

[vidrep]

Here are a couple of sites which host files for testing:

​https://x265.com/hevc-video-files/

​http://h265files.com/

​http://www.elecard.com/en/download/videos.html

​http://labs.divx.com/node/127909

[vidrep]

While it would be "nice" to see this added, getting YouTube working with ffmpeg is probably a better investment of developer time.

[vidrep]

This would be a nice enhancement for 64 bit Haiku. Tested with mplayer on 64 bit, which plays video perfectly, but without any audio.

​https://launchpad.net/ffmpeg/+announcement/12062

​https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/H.265

[cocobean]

Tears of Steel on Haiku hrev 52012

[cocobean]

H.265 test on Haiku hrev 52012

[cocobean]

Resolved. Tested on hrev52012 x86_64. Grab several videos from links above. Tested Austrian Alps and Tears of Steel H.265 videos as well as a few others and playback through MediaPlayer up to 4K video resolution.

[vidrep]

This is not fixed! HEVC is a particular type of H265 that is supported in ffmpeg but not yet on Haiku.

[waddlesplash]

Um, HEVC *is* H265, they are the same thing. That is probably a MPEG-4 container, try renaming it to .mp4 and see if it plays.

[vidrep]

If you rename to .mkv then it plays.

[vidrep]

We need to set the .hevc file association for instances where that extension is used. We can't expect everybody to change file names all the time. Click and play.

[waddlesplash]

If it's really a .mkv, then we should be detecting this via sniffer, not depending on filename.

[vidrep]

I'm not sure if that's what PulkoMandy did to enable AVCHD files, which can use either M2TS, MTS or M2T.

[cocobean]

Ah, you want *.hevc file association to a specific program. I read the ticket as we couldn't playback/decode HEVC videos in Haiku (at all).

@vidrep - I did this by select file -> right click on file -> Select 'Get Info' on file _> Select Default application {Mediaplayer, MPlayer, etc) Then when I click on file it works with the app/tool selected.

The 'better' global way is to go: Desktop->System->Preferences->FileTypes You'll see the FileTypea panel for selecting your application and a 'file recognition' window for the adding your file extensions. You can select 'MediaPlayer playlist' and then add '.hevc' and '.h265' extension to file recognition window. Go to top menu 'File' and Quit (it will save info when added).

[pulkomandy]

File extensions should not be used anywhere, but MediaPlayer will reject files if there is no media/* type assigned to them, IIRC. We should just add the appropriate sniffing rules if we're missing some, then.

We don't use the filename ourselves, however we do forward it to ffmpeg as it helps in some corner cases (eg. detecting Amiga MOD files, which don't really have any useful header).

[mmlr]

Indeed sniffer rules should be used instead of file extensions. In either case, HEVC is a video codec, not a container format. So HEVC data does not come as a standalone file but the bitstream is put in a specific container (Matroska, WebM, MP4) to hold additional metadata and other streams (i.e. audio, subtitles, timecodes, ...). An actual file then gets the extension from the container. So adding blank hevc or h265 extensions doesn't make much sense to me. For these initial samples there may be a variety of extensions used, but when HEVC use becomes more common this will probably go away. Afterall you don't usually see files with an h264 extension either.

[vidrep]

MediaPlayer does indeed play these files, but only after manually changing the file extension to one that is recognized. I have changed the ticket description to better reflect the real issue.

[cocobean]

@vidrec - Tested on hrev52064 x86_64. Confirmed MediaPlayer works with HVEC/10-bit color video files w/FFmpeg 4.0.1. I tested it without any file extension and runs smoothly @1080p and @2160p with some minor stuttering/frame drops at UHD/4K (impressive). I renamed the file extensions to something obscure (*.new) and MediaPlayer still handled the H.265/HVEC files correctly.

I was using mplayer/mpv but now MediaPlayer seems to handle the files much better than before. Minor issues with 'out of memory' and audio issues on backend with certain files - but plays video.

[waddlesplash]

Fixed in hrev52329.