H.265 HEVC Example Shows Off High-Quality 4K Video at a Mere 10Mbit/s

We talked last month about the upcoming H.265 “HEVC” video codec, and on paper, it sounded impressive… as heck. Imagine 1080p content, for example, that looks as if it were encoded with H.264 but takes up just half of the total storage space. It sounds a bit like a pipe-dream, but there’s been more evidence to help prove that it’s not.

Our friends at Bright Side of News* spotted a video posted by DigInfo that shows off a display running 4K content at a mere 10Mbit/s average bit-rate. To help put this into perspective, most Blu-ray movies hover at around the 25Mbit/s mark most times, with a variance ranging from 10Mbit/s ~ 40Mbit/s. But here, we have a video 4x the resolution of Blu-ray running at a fraction of the average bit-rate – oh, and at 60 FPS.

Given that we’re watching a mere video of a video, it’s not exactly easy to gauge the real-world quality that was displayed, but we’d have to imagine that if it weren’t impressive, it wouldn’t have been shown off. With this kind of proof-of-concept though, I find myself getting a bit more excited not only for the 4K revolution, but the thought of being able to re-encode current content using a much more efficient codec than H.264. My NAS certainly wouldn’t mind having all those gigabytes freed up.

Despite all this, I’m still a bit skeptical, because the math simply doesn’t favor this kind of result. However, I’m willing to wait and see how things progress, because one thing’s for certain: I definitely want this to be true.