Recently I bought a new camera because I ruined mine during my vacation to the Peru (ah the dunes of Huacachina is beautiful but it's Sandy…).
So I had my sights on the Samsung NX500, a camera hybrid APS – C able to shoot in 4K (cinema and UHD) – 30 FPS and Full HD – 60 fps.
The resolution of the 4K is a chasm in terms of storage, Samsung had the good idea to encode videos in H265 that allows to generate video files two times less heavy to equal quality (compared to the H264). This encoding is not yet very widespread format, it would have been nice that Samsung offers the choice of filming in H264 in addition to the H265. This is not the case but a software is included for re – encode H264 videos (and thus the loss of storage space offered the H265) to read on all platforms.
The problem is not Samsung as the H265 was announced a little while ago now but is poorly supported by the video players.
If the H.265 allows a significant gain on the size of the file and a twice lower flow, it has the disadvantage of ask a lot of resources to decode. Very few graphics cards (some nVidia GTX do it) include the hardware decoding of the H265 so it is the processor that does all the work.
I have a MacBook Pro Retina 15 inch composed of the processor Intel Core i7 2.5 GHz with Intel Iris Pro Graphics 5200, a NVIDIA GeForce GT 750 M 2048 MB and 16 GB of RAM, I dared to believe it would be quiet. I tried several software but neither VLC (in any version even the 3.0 beta), or other readers I've tried don't work. The picture freezes almost instantly in Full HD or 4K.
The only drive that can read them on my MacBook (at the price of a good scalability of the processor), it is DivX Player!
When you try to play a video encoded in H265 for the first time, the player will offer you to download DivX plugin, HEVC. Launch the installation of the plug-in without which you can't play the video!
Beware, this software works in my case but as I don't know how much is the hardware configuration of the computer in the problem, it is that it doesn't work for you. In absence of graphics card supporting the H265 decoding it is the graphical part of the processor that will do the job. I have an Intel Pro Graphics Iris 5200. Below an Iris Intel Pro 4200 Graphics it probably won't work.
