Does 1080p HEVC (h265) on RPi3?

Help and Support Raspberry Pi
1

I currently have an RPi Model B (first gen) which I use as a bedroom media centre with OSMC. I have recently been using HEVC videos as my standard which work fine on my PC but the RPi struggles to play them at 1fps! I have read through the forums and it sounds like the RPi 3 should be able to play them smoothly? Is this correct? If so I will order one asap. To be clear, I don’t need 4k playback. Most of my HEVC videos are 720p but some are 1080p .

Thanks
Allan

2

Most 720p should be fine, for 1080p it really depends on several factors you might only get 50% playing fine.
Only OSMC device that plays all of them without issue is the Vero4k (evenso you don’t need 4k)

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3

Can you hint as to what some of these factors might be? Bitrate? Audio codec? Other?

4

Bitrate is quite a factor also 10-Bit would not play on Pi3

5

Thanks

6

My pi3B will play 10 bit HEVC if I disable MMAL (hardware decoding). Some say if you buy a MPG2 codec license it will work with MMAL.
Pi4B plays them OK because there in no MMAL.

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7

Thanks for reminding me about the mpeg2 licence i bought.

Was wrecking my head why a few 10bit hevc 1080p files were glitchy while others that were encoded the same played fine.

I forgot to transfer over my mpeg2 licence to boot config when i started new installation. Videos play fine now.

Although its strange why some of them played fine while other didn’t. They were encoded with same exact settings.

Thanks again

8

Actually once activated on the specific hardware the licence keys are not needed anymore on boot even when changing SD Cards.