4.6.9 - January 31, 2018 H.265 hardware decoding added

Last week I emailed support saying that I didn't know of anyone who had H.265 acceleration working yet, and wondered what was going on with that. Ken got back to me yesterday and it turns out he hasn't been able to test it himself yet because the hardware he tried it on returns a "not implemented" message. Apparently he was testing on a NUC and it might be unclear if the CPU in there supports H.265 hardware acceleration. He wasn't very specific.

As a software developer myself, I'd say there is a pretty good chance he'll need to buy new hardware to debug on before the error can be tracked down.
 
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Note the 4.7.1.0 patch added this line to the change log as a result of my feedback:
  • Incompatible HW decoding will now be caught and logged, and the setting automatically reset to No.
 
Just to add to this discussion. I have noticed that the benefits of H.265 (no HW Decode) vs H.264 (HW Decode), such as smaller video clip sizes, far out weigh the lack of HW decoding at the moment. Assuming your CPU usage is decent (within tolerable range), I would suggest running your cameras at H.265 with BI for the time being until they can figure out the HW decode issues.
 
I am indeed getting this message logged when I enable H.265 on one of my Dahua Starlight cams:

Code: 
1  3/7/2018 12:04:26 PM   road2                HW VA not compatible: -3

Blue Iris 4.7.1 automatically sets the hardware acceleration for this camera to "No" when that happens.

Interestingly, the Status window > Messages tab only shows this log entry for a split second, then it disappears and you have to look in the log file to find it. I let Ken know about this.
 
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aj2600 said:
Just to add to this discussion. I have noticed that the benefits of H.265 (no HW Decode) vs H.264 (HW Decode), such as smaller video clip sizes, far out weigh the lack of HW decoding at the moment. Assuming your CPU usage is decent (within tolerable range), I would suggest running your cameras at H.265 with BI for the time being until they can figure out the HW decode issues.
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I agree-- at least on an i7 7700k, I switched all my cameras to h.264, turned on hardware acceleration, and made sure in gpu-z that the intel 630 was being utilized (it was -- being used 70% when BI was running, and only when BI was running). my CPU usage for BI is around 40-45%

Using h.265, intel 630 usage is 0% (no surprise), but cpu usage for BI is for all intents and purposes, the same -- around 40-45%, sometimes dipping in the to 50%'s . When I get around to it, I'm switching all cameras back to h.265.
 
To my knowledge, the only way to do H.265 hardware acceleration in BI is to use an Nvidia graphics card, but that is super inefficient so not usually a good investment.
 
bp2008 said:
To my knowledge, the only way to do H.265 hardware acceleration in BI is to use an Nvidia graphics card, but that is super inefficient so not usually a good investment.
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Is there any point or negative impact, assuming it records anyway, to setting cameras to 265, will it cause BI/PC to work harder or will it auto adjust recording to 264?
 
Using h.265 without hw acceleration works great. On newer CPUs there is no noticeable difference in utilization in my tests. The benefit of h.265 is smaller file sizes and decreased bandwidth consumption which really helps with wifi cameras.
 
peterfram said:
Using h.265 without hw acceleration works great. On newer CPUs there is no noticeable difference in utilization in my tests. The benefit of h.265 is smaller file sizes and decreased bandwidth consumption which really helps with wifi cameras.
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Of course there is a difference. A significant one. You can't test a function that doesn't work.
 
fenderman said:
Of course there is a difference. A significant one. You can't test a function that doesn't work.
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I should have specified I was referring to cpu utilization of h.265 vs h.264 on newer CPUs without hw acceleration. Utilization seems about the same.
 
It could be possible if the cameras dont use features of h265 that require significantly more cpu to decode I suppose. My own experiments show little quality difference from h264 to h265 at a given bit rate, on my cams. Many of mine still dont support h265 so I havent been able to do a proper cpu usage test.
 
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bp2008 said:
It could be possible if the cameras dont use features of h265 that require significantly more cpu to decode I suppose. My own experiments show little quality difference from h264 to h265 at a given bit rate, on my cams. Many of mine still dont support h265 so I havent been able to do a proper cpu usage test.
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Even if the h.265 required the same cpu usage as 264, you would still see a difference between ha and no ha.
 
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