Apple & Teradek to support H.265, but can we use it yet?
By Jim Bask
At NAB Teradek announced H.265 support. At WWDC, Apple did the same. Let’s explore what this means, short and long term.
We all want to be able to use H.265 instead of the “old fashioned” H.264 to get higher efficient encoding and compression: the same quality at a lower size or bandwidth, or higher quality/resolution at the same size or bandwidth as before. First, at NAB in April 2017, Teradek announced new support for H.265 in some of its streaming hardware devices, and with its own online Core transcoding middleware service. Next, at WWDC, Apple announced native H.265 support in both the upcoming palindromic version 11 of iOS, and in macOS High Sierra, the upcoming replacement for Sierra 10.12.x. Since I haven’t seen such H.265 announcements from popular CDNs, I asked Teradek three key questions. Ahead you will see my inquiry, their answers and my conclusions.