Ok2: announcement

[haha11]

will this be on all channels? Would love to see higher quality/less delay for sports

[Emporium]

Theres a ton of mag 254's out. Thats a lot of mac reseting and transferring accounts to new stbs . 1st generation firesticks also effected. A slew of people are going to be pissed off.

I'm sure there will be some upset users. However at one point you need to just make the call, in order to move forward with new technologies. You will never be able to satisfy everyone. h265 will bring many benefits to both client and server side. Huge difference in bandwidth.

Would be nice if next they can offer some tiered plan for multiple connections from the same IP with 4 TVs in the house, would be nice to be able to have 3 connections at least (without paying for 3 subs).

[surfinisfun]

will this be on all channels? Would love to see higher quality/less delay for sports

Guess you'll have to wait and see.....

P.S, Your user name should be banned, or changed.

Sorry for the hijack.

[6strings]

We will be upgrading our streams to h265 next week. This should increase quality and reduce bandwidth
Mag 250 and 254 users will need to upgrade their boxes to use ok2

I am hoping that maximizing the picture quality is a priority over reducing bandwidth.

[dishuser]

I am hoping that maximizing the picture quality is a priority over reducing bandwidth.

how can that be the priority when it does both?

[Canadian]

Will the stb-emulator handle the h.265 ?
reason why i'm asking is that i have a older android box that doesn't indicate h.265 on packaging.

[dishuser]

Will the stb-emulator handle the h.265 ?
reason why i'm asking is that i have a older android box that doesn't indicate h.265 on packaging.

it's the box not the emulator that needs to be h265 compatible

[The Noof]

H265 is really just a codec.If you can add the codec,it should work.

[herk]

c and p

As data-intensive as HD is, 4K is even worse. While most of us were just getting used to the idea of H.264's advantages over MPEG-2 on Blu-ray, the Motion Picture Experts Group and the International Telecommunication Union's Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) were already starting work on the next generation of video compression, with an eye on the future.

Not wanting to mess around with small, incremental improvements, whenever a new compression standard is introduced, it has to be a sizable change. With each jump, the general rule is half the bit rate for the same quality (or greater quality at the same bit rate).

How does it do this? Largely by expanding on how AVC (and other compression techniques before it) works.

First, it looks at multiple frames to see what doesn't change. In most scenes in a TV show or movie, the vast majority of the frame doesn't change much. Think of a scene with someone talking. The shot is mostly their head. The background isn't going to change much for many frames. For that matter, most of the pixels representing their face probably won't change much (other than their lips, of course). So instead of encoding every pixel from every frame, an initial frame is encoded, and then after that only what changes is encoded (basically).

HEVC then expands the size of the area that's looked at for these changes. Larger and smaller "blocks" essentially, which offers additional efficiency. Ever seen blocks in your image, when the picture goes foul? Those can be bigger, smaller, and differently shaped with HEVC than with previous compression methods. Larger blocks, for example, were found to be more efficient.

Then other things were improved, like motion compensation, spatial prediction, and so on. All of these things would have been done with AVC or even earlier, but it required more processing power than was economically feasible at the time.

During the development phase, the compression algorithm is tested objectively, for its raw number efficiency, but also subjectively, by video professionals comparing different compression methods and amounts in a "blind" test, where they don't know which method is which. The human element is crucial. Just because a computer says one level of compression is better than another doesn't mean it looks better than another.

Because H.265 is so much more processor intensive, don't expect a simple firmware upgrade to get your gear to decode it. In fact, that's part of the issue. You need a hardware decoder somewhere. If your new media streamer, cable box, or BD player has it, then you'll be all set (presuming you also have HDMI 2.0 so you can get 2160p/60 and not just 2160p/30). Could a high-end PC decode it via software? Maybe. Could the Xbox One or PS4? Not likely. Everyone loves their favorite console, but remember, this generation's hardware is equivalent to a pretty average PC.

[The Noof]

After pokin' around a little, there's talk of the mag team adding h256 to the firmware...via update I would assume.

[The Noof]

c and p

As data-intensive as HD is, 4K is even worse. While most of us were just getting used to the idea of H.264's advantages over MPEG-2 on Blu-ray, the Motion Picture Experts Group and the International Telecommunication Union's Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) were already starting work on the next generation of video compression, with an eye on the future.

Not wanting to mess around with small, incremental improvements, whenever a new compression standard is introduced, it has to be a sizable change. With each jump, the general rule is half the bit rate for the same quality (or greater quality at the same bit rate).

How does it do this? Largely by expanding on how AVC (and other compression techniques before it) works.

First, it looks at multiple frames to see what doesn't change. In most scenes in a TV show or movie, the vast majority of the frame doesn't change much. Think of a scene with someone talking. The shot is mostly their head. The background isn't going to change much for many frames. For that matter, most of the pixels representing their face probably won't change much (other than their lips, of course). So instead of encoding every pixel from every frame, an initial frame is encoded, and then after that only what changes is encoded (basically).

HEVC then expands the size of the area that's looked at for these changes. Larger and smaller "blocks" essentially, which offers additional efficiency. Ever seen blocks in your image, when the picture goes foul? Those can be bigger, smaller, and differently shaped with HEVC than with previous compression methods. Larger blocks, for example, were found to be more efficient.

Then other things were improved, like motion compensation, spatial prediction, and so on. All of these things would have been done with AVC or even earlier, but it required more processing power than was economically feasible at the time.

During the development phase, the compression algorithm is tested objectively, for its raw number efficiency, but also subjectively, by video professionals comparing different compression methods and amounts in a "blind" test, where they don't know which method is which. The human element is crucial. Just because a computer says one level of compression is better than another doesn't mean it looks better than another.

Because H.265 is so much more processor intensive, don't expect a simple firmware upgrade to get your gear to decode it. In fact, that's part of the issue. You need a hardware decoder somewhere. If your new media streamer, cable box, or BD player has it, then you'll be all set (presuming you also have HDMI 2.0 so you can get 2160p/60 and not just 2160p/30). Could a high-end PC decode it via software? Maybe. Could the Xbox One or PS4? Not likely. Everyone loves their favorite console, but remember, this generation's hardware is equivalent to a pretty average PC.

How old is this Herk?Several media players decode H265,like VLC.I can stream h265 on all of my htpcs no sweat.

[herk]

How old is this Herk?Several media players decode H265,like VLC.I can stream h265 on all of my htpcs no sweat.

sorry its a little outdated 2014 cnet

[The Noof]

sorry its a little outdated 2014 cnet

Thought so.

[Emporium]

After pokin' around a little, there's talk of the mag team adding h256 to the firmware...via update I would assume.

I'm assuming you meant h265

However, they may add the codec for it an all, but I'm not sure the 254 would have enough juice to handle the "heavier" streams. The STiH207 processor it uses does have native support for h264, but since it is over 7 years old, it does not have any native support for h265 as far as I know, and would have to decode it all in software. This would be extremely heavy for the 650Mhz CPU without any native support. The Mag 254 is also on a linux kernel 2.6.x tree (as far as I can tell) which limits the available options, since it is only unofficially still supported and not much new is released for it.

They may try to add the support (eventually), but unless you will be running it in 720p only, I'm not sure if it will be able to keep up.

The box has had a good long run. However, at one point, things must move on.

[The Noof]

I'm assuming you meant h265

However, they may add the codec for it an all, but I'm not sure the 254 would have enough juice to handle the "heavier" streams. The STiH207 processor it uses does have native support for h264, but since it is over 7 years old, it does not have any native support for h265 as far as I know, and would have to decode it all in software. This would be extremely heavy for the 650Mhz CPU without any native support. The Mag 254 is also on a linux kernel 2.6.x tree (as far as I can tell) which limits the available options, since it is only unofficially still supported and not much new is released for it.

They may try to add the support (eventually), but unless you will be running it in 720p only, I'm not sure if it will be able to keep up.

The box has had a good long run. However, at one point, things must move on.

Yes...sorry.H265.