Downloaded a couple episodes of a series to watch, to see if any good, but my Pi2 keeps crashing with the sad face. The files are MKV files, and are specced as x265, 720p. I do have some films in MKV format which are okay, but they are x264. I’ve done a Google search for x265 on the Pi2/Pi3, but only finding stuff a couple of years old.
I’ve running the latest version of Kodi (v18.3 compiled 2019-06-20). Since I’m not finding anything recent, is this still an issue for people, or do I have odd things happening on my Pi2? It’s a bog standard Pi2 with only one addon, and that’s the ‘missing films’ one.
I suppose I can always look for x264 versions of the same shows, but since x265 is newer and better, I’d assume more stuff would appear using that.
The Pi can not decode x265 in Hardware but need to do so in software (with the CPU). A Pi2 will hardly be able to do so. An overclocked Pi3 could might be able to keep up with it.
Your best bet for proper x265 would be a Vero4k who can decode it in Hardware.
I can play almost any 720p x265 (non-10bit) in rpi3b+, and even some 1080p (non-10bit). My rpi3b+ is not overclocked. I switched from rpi2 to rpi3 like 3 moths ago, and I remember playing them in rpi2 also.
Anyway, it’s not guaranteed, you’ll have to try each file.
The only thing that definitely won’t play, neither in rpi2 nor in rpi3, is x265 10bit.
You are able to play the files from wherever you are getting them. The problem is that h.265 encodes are not a fixed complexity to decode so when you are software decoding the amount of processing power is very relevant. Depending on how it was encoded one file could take many times as much CPU to decode than another.