Summary: Trying to convert your HEVC (H.265) video? All you need is a decent HEVC converter. In this article, we'll focus on the best H.265 converter – VideoProc, and how to use it to convert HEVC to or from H.264, MP4, and other prevalent codecs in lightning-fast speed.

High Efficiency Video Codec (HEVC), also referred to as H.265 and MPEG-H Part 2, has never been more popular than it is today. 43% of the respondents in a survey made by Bitmovin in 2019 said they currently use the HEVC codec. The prosperity of this high compressed codec owns much to the support from the leading hardware, software, and digital ecosystem companies. The number of the installed base that can decode HEVC in 2020 is around 3.644 billion from estimated. This includes recent iPhone devices that can capture and receive HEVC videos, the majority of the action cameras, and drones, etc.

Well, H.264 and MP4 (MPEG-4) are different things. MP4 is a container format, while H.264 is a video compression codec. So to play H.264 on Mac, you will need a video container like MP4 to host the encoded video. The advantages of H.264 over MP4 is, it is about 2 times more efficient than MP4 encoding, thanks for its high compression rate.

• 2010 May 25 — x264 won MSU Sixth MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 Video Codecs Comparison, with 24% better encoding than second place. 2005 December 26 — x264 won Doom9's 2005 codec shoot-out, passing Ateme by a hair. 2005 December 12 — x264 tied for 1st place (with Ateme) in the second annual MSU MPEG-4 AVC/ H.264 codecs comparison.
• Nov 30, 2006 Download the latest version of x264 QuickTime Codec for Mac - Encode H.264 faster than the Apple encoder. Read 11 user reviews of x264 QuickTime Codec on MacUpdate.
• H.264 is really optimized to be a delivery codec while ProRes is optimized to be an editing codec. That said, if you just need to do a simple edit and your Mac has the power to edit H.264 you can get away with it no problem, but if you plan to do a heavy edit with lots of transitions and effects and color grading you will be best served by ProRes.

However, the license fee for using the HEVC codec in hardware, software, and contents are far more expensive than its older brother H.264, let alone open source ones like VP8 or VP9. Besides, the popularization of a new industry standard codec often takes years. It's still uncertain whether HEVC can be the next standardized video codec. Thus, before that, many companies still have concerns about making this high-priced investment. Browsers like Google don't natively go compatible with HEVC, most of the video editing software and media player still get some trouble to process HEVC files, such as

• • can't view GoPro footages,
• • iPhone video won't play on vlc,
• to name a few.

And the easiest solution to all HEVC related errors is: Take a solid HEVC converter to change HEVC to MP4 H.264. In fact, whether you intend to convert HEVC to another more compatible format or transcode a video to HEVC for shrinking size, you'll need a reliable HEVC converter.

VideoProc HEVC Converter - Change HEVC from/to 420+ Formats

After testing dozens of video converter software in the market, we realize the best HEVC converter for both PC and Mac is VideoProc. With it, users can convert HEVC to H.264, AVI, AV1, MOV, MKV, VP8, VP9, WebM, and another 420+ formats in a few clicks. Need also transcode videos from other formats to HEVC? Things can be done in this HEVC converter in seconds.

VideoProc - The Easiest HEVC Converter with the World No.1 Conversion Speed

• Convert HEVC to H.264, WEBM, MP4, VP8/VP9, AV1, MPEG-2/MPEG-4, MKV, AVI, MOV, and more.
• Losslessly transcode video to X.265: save at least 50% of bit rate while not downgrading quality.
• Customize output properties: resolution, bitrate, sample rate, frame rate, and more.
• Full GPU acceleration: convert HEVC at speed up to 47x faster than real-time play.

What Features VideoProc HEVC Converter Your Best Bet?

No Visible Quality Loss: The adoption of the entropy coding^[1] for lossless coding of moving pictures, and the support of intelligently switch between All-I (intra-frame) and IPB (inter-frame) compression allows you to convert or compress HEVC while retaining the original picture quality.

High Compression Ratio: Allow to reduce the file size (over 90%). Thanks to the adoption of the latest x265 encoding scheme, VideoProc supports dynamically reconfigured bitrate target for efficiently shrinking videos to small size, and the new option of limit-sao achieves 2% to 10% boost in speed while limiting the artifacts causing by SAO (Sample Adaptive Offsets).

Support 420+ Formats: This versatile HEVC converter comes with the capability to convert HEVC to H.264, AV1, MPEG-2/4, MOV, VP8/9, WebM, and vice versa. It also supports to turn music, audio recordings, and audio tracks in prevelant video formats to any of your desired audio formats including AAC, MP3, OGG, FLV, WMV…

Everything is in One Click: Hit Auto Copy to remux your video for getting 1:1 quality and flash speed, tap 2-pass Encoding to take advantage of VBR (Variable Bitrate) to encode your video in a more accurate, flexible, and bitrate-saving manner.

Rich Editing Tools: Equipped with the basic video editing toolkits, as like, trim, crop, rotate, split, merge, subtitles, filters, deshake, and more, you can polish videos before or after conversion without installing an extra video editor.

Zero Learning Curve: The clean and straightforward interface of this full-featured HEVC converter enables a newbie to change HEVC to MP4, H.264, MPEG-4, MOV, ProRes, MKV, AVI, and vice versa within 3 clicks.

Word No.1 Speed: The support of level-3 GPU acceleration technology^[2] enables you to unleash the power of your dedicated AMD, NVIDIA, and Intel graphics card. According to the test, this can bring you a lightning-fast conversion speed - up to 47x faster than the real-time playback while keeping a low CPU usage rate. That's being said, it allows transcode hour's long video in minutes even on less-powerful machines.

How to Convert HEVC to MP4, H.264, AVI, Mpeg-2, VP8, VP9...

Step 1. Add the HEVC video to VideoProc.

Free download and install the best HEVC converter on Windows or Mac computer.
Run VideoProc and click the 'Video' button on the main interface. Click the '+Video' button to import source HEVC Video.

Step 2. Select the output format.

Click on 'Target Format' and select the video format that you'd like to get. In this case, I intend to convert x265 to x264. Therefore, here I click on H.264 MP4.
Note: if there is the need to transcode a video to HEVC, there you should choose HEVC MP4.

Step 3. Start the conversion.

Hit the 'RUN' button to start converting HEVC to H.264.

Bonus: How to Customize the Output File Properties When Converting HEVC?

Suppose you need to take Full Control over the output quality. In step 2, you can click on the gear icon on aside of the chosen target format. This will lead you to the property settings panel.

• There you move the cursor on the quality slider left/right to quickly adjust the video size and quality.
• Increase or decrease the value for the option of bitrate to downgrade or enhance the quality.
• Set up the desired frame rate, resolution, aspect ratio, sample rate, audio codec for the corresponding options.
• After you made the proper settings, click on 'Done'.

Additonal Way 1: Take HandBrake Free HEVC converter

HandBrake is a free and open-source video converter program runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. It comes with the capability to convert HEVC videos to H.264, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, Thera, VP8 and VP9, and vice versa.

It is a feature-rich HEVC converter. However, the plethora of difficult jargon, out-of-date interface, and limited output container options (MKV, MP4, AVI) are just a few of the things that have led me and many other beginners to oft-favor a certain other HEVC converter. Too many redundant steps are required by Handbrake to batch convert HEVC videos, and the extremely unstable performance are also biggies.

How about it's convesion speed? Is HandBrake a CPU hog?

When I converted a 40 seconds HEVC with the bitrate of 4042kb/s, and resolution of 1920x1080p to H.264 MP4 by applying the default setting of HandBrake and VideoProc,
HandBrake took 43 seconds 👎 to get the things done, and VideoProc spent only 18 seconds 👍;
HandBrake blasted up the CPU usage rate to 90%, In the same case, VideoProc took advantage of the GPU acceleration that barely occupies the CPU resource.

How to Convert HEVC Video with HandBrake?

Step 1. Launch up HandBrake video converter on your PC or MAC. Drag the source HEVC video that you'd like to convert and drop it to Handbrake. The process is the same if need to convert a video that comes with another format. You can also click on File and then select the original file to load it up to Handbrake.

Step 2. On the main interface, change the video container from MP4, MKV, and AVI if necessary. After that, click on 'Video' to enter a new section. Unfold the drop-down box of 'Video Codec', you'll be given H.264, HEVC 8-bit/10bit, MPEG, and some other codec options. Click on the target codec.

Step 3. You can leave the 'Framerate' value as the default or set a specified value. Move the cursor on the quality slider left or right to decrease or increase the quality.

Step 4. HandBrake won't automatically change the audio codec to match the selected audio codec. Therefore, you sometimes need to adjust the audio codec manually to get avoid any no audio or a/v out of sync problems.

Step 5. Click on 'Summary' to check the resolution, bitrate, sample rate, and other properties of your media tracks.

Additional Way 2: Use FFMPEG HEVC Converter (Not for Beginners)

FFMPEG enables you to convert HEVC to H.264 and other prevalent codecs. You can also utilize it to turn H.264, VP8, or other videos to HEVC high-compressed format.

Unlike common software that comes with interface with well-designed guidance, FFmpeg offers you only a command window. This means you have to input the proper command line to apply any converting decisions. It usually takes a steep learning curve for those who don't know a command line environment to do even the most simple thing by using FFmpeg. Keep reading on the step-by-step guide on converting HEVC with FFmpeg on Windows, you'll know what I mean.

It's a long and CPU-intensive process to convert HEVC with FFmpeg...

VideoProc took 25 seconds to convert a 2.5 minutes 4K HEVC video to H.264, with 2% average CPU usage rate.
With FFmpeg, I spent around 4 minutes getting the job done with the average CPU usage rate up to 99%.

Actually, FFmpeg supports GPU acceleration and allows users to customize the priority of the CPU process. However, occasional users have to dive deep into a number of difficult command lines and experience lots of errors and trails to skillfully apply them. So, why bother yourself with FFmpeg since VideoProc is far more intuitive and faster than FFMPEG?

How to Convert HEVC with FFmpeg?

Step 1. Go to the FFmpeg official download site. There you are given many different versions correspond to Windows, Mac, and Linux respectively. After you choose which operating system you want to install in, you'll be lead to the FFmpeg Builds Page which displays the version, architecture, linking, and license information of the install pack that you are going to acquire.

Step 2. Click on Download Build. In my case, I download Windows 64-bit static version.

Step 3. Once the install pack is successfully downloaded on your computer, you need to take 7zip to extract the ffpmeg.exe.

Step 4. Move over to your system directly (in most of the cases, the OS/C: folder), and create a new folder named FFmpeg.

Step 5. Paste the expanded files for the ffmpeg.exe to this newly created folder.

Step 6. Navigate to your computer, click on 'System properties', select 'Advanced system settings', choose 'Environment Variables', and tab New. There you set the variable name as Path, and set the 'Variable value' as C:FFmpegbin.

Step 7. Press Windows and R button on your keyboard, and input CMD to launch up the Command Prompt window in administrator mode.

Step 8. Copy the path of the source HEVC video.

Step 9. Press the blank button on your keyboard, input cd, and then press the space button again. There you paste the copied source video path and press Enter.

Step 10. Enter ffmpeg -i test.m4v -c:v libx264 -crf 18 -c:a copy output.mp4, and then press 'Enter'.

test.m4v is the name of my file plus the extension. Suppose your source media is test.mkv, there you need to enter ffmpeg -i test.mkv -c:v libx264 -crf 18 -c:a copy output.mp4. Assume you need to convert H.264 to HEVC MP4, you need to input: ffmpeg –i my_movie input.mp4 -c:v libx265 -vtag hvc1 output.mp4.

The given commands are just our recommendation that can deliver high-quality output. There are also lots of other available command lines, you can come over to FFmpeg Encoding Guide to get more information.

Step 11. FFmpeg now starts to transcode and encode the source HEVC file. This process may eat up your CPU and memory storage. I just take a screen capture during the processing process, and it shows that CPU usage rage blasts up to 94.9%, and the memory usage rate rises to 54%.

Is HEVC Better than H.264/AVC?

Easy Answer: HEVC is superior to H.264 with regard to storage, bandwidth saving, and picture quality. HEVC video looks more crispy and retains more details than H.264 when the given bitrate and other properties are the same. This owned a lot to the application of the more advanced compression algorithm which is featured with coding tree unites based blocks, the optimized motion-vector prediction, 35 directional intra prediction modes, and enhanced interpolation filter, etc.

HEVC VS H.264: Some Key Improvements

• Block Size

The basic building units of H.264/AVC are the macroblocks^[3], which consist of 16 × 16 samples. However, many recent studies found the larger pixel block size is much more efficient to compress high-resolution videos. The small 16x16 blocks are insufficient to capture the increased spatial correlation from 1080P and other large videos. In HEVC, a slice is subdivided into multiple CTU(coding tree units)^[4]. Depending on the complicity of the picture, these CTUs can have different size: 16 x 16, 32 x 32, 64 x 64. In this way, the efficiency and flexibility of compression can get improved.

• Block Partitioning Structure

Unlike the macroblock of H.264, the CTUs of HEVC includes CU (Coding Unit), PU (prediction Unit), and TU (Transform Unit). The separate of these 3 units make the division of each portion better fits the texture features of motion pictures, brings up much flexibility in transformation, prediction and coding process, and is good for fulfilling the function of each unit.

• Parallel Tool

The coding of HEVC is much more complicated than H.264. To facilitate the coding efficiency, two high-level parallelization tools^[5] are introduced to HEVC: Title and WPP (Wavefront Parallel Processing). Tiles divide a picture into several rectangle groups of coding tree blocks. Each Tile can be regarded as an LCU (Large Coding Unit) that allows being decoded separately. By using WPP, the consecutive rows of CTUs is decoded in parallel using multi threads. With the increasing demand for viewing high-resolution videos, these parallel tools allow the computer to make full use of the multi-core processors to play these contents smoothly.

• Frame Prediction

As for Intraframe prediction, HEVC supports 33 angular modes while H.264 only allows 8 different mode. More angular prediction mode brings HEVC higher coding efficiency and is also helpful for getting a smooth sample surface. As for internal Frame prediction, HEVC provides higher compression ratio and picture quality as well as remove redundancy in a video sequence by optimizing the motion prediction.

• SAO (Sample Adaptive Offset)

HEVC introduces SAO^[6] with the intend to reduce sample distortion, increase the compression ratio, and decrease the bitrate. This new in-loop filtering technique classifies the reconstructed samples into various categories based on BO (Band offset) and Eo (Edge offset) to get an offset for each category, and then add that offsets to each sample of each category. The adoption of SAO averagely receives 2% to 6% save in bitrate with only a 2% increase in the consumption of decode/encode resources.

2. Test Data: HEVC VS H.264

• Save Storage Bits: HEVC > H.264

One minute of 1080p HD, 60fps H.264 video takes up around 175MB storage space on your iPhone.
One minute of 1080p HD, 60fps HEVC video occupies 90MB storage space on your iPhone.

• Save Bandwidth: HEVC > H.264

Around 32Mbps of bandwidth is required to stream 4K broadcast.
Approximately 15Mbps of bandwidth is needed to stream the same content.

• Popularity: H.264 > HEVC

Despise that many people use both H.264 and HEVC, overall H.264 user is twice as that of HEVC users.
The majority of editing software can't decode HEVC correctly.

• Quality: HEVC > H.264

HEVC delivers better picture quality when the given bitrate is the same with the H.264 clip.

Popular Devices and Browsers that Natively Support HEVC

Smartphones, TVs and computers:

• iOS 11 or later iPhone devices.
• Android 5.0 or higher smartphones.
• Almost all 4K UHD TV sets.
• Windows 10, macOS High Sierra, or later.

Hardware on Windows 10:

• 6th Generation Intel Skylake or newer.
• AMD's 6th Generation Carrizo APUs or newer.
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 900 series or newer.
• AMD R9 Fury, R9 Fury X, or newer.

DSLR, action cameras, and drones:

• GoPro Hero 6, Hero7, and Hero8.
• PHANTOM 4 PRO, MAVI 2 ZOOM, MAVIC 2 PRO, PHANTOM 4 PRO, PHANTOM 4 ADVANCED.
• The entire camera line of ZCam.
• Panasonic Lumix S1H, AU-EVA 1, AG-CX350, AJ-CX4000GJ.
• Canon XF-705, EOS-1D X Mark III, EOS R5.

Browsers:

• IE11; Edge12-18(Partially Support); Safari 13, 13.1, 14-TP; iOS 11-13.3, 13.5, 14.0.

Reference:

Free Video Codec For Mac

x264 is a free softwarelibrary and application for encoding video streams into the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC compression format, and is released under the terms of the GNU GPL.

Features Overview

• Provides best-in-class performance, compression, and features.
• Achieves dramatic performance, encoding 4 or more 1080p streams in realtime on a single consumer-level computer.
• Gives the best quality, having the most advanced psychovisual optimizations.
• Support features necessary for many different applications, such as television broadcast, Blu-ray low-latency video applications, and web video.
• x264 forms the core of many web video services, such as Youtube, Facebook, Vimeo, and Hulu. It is widely used by television broadcasters and ISPs.

Getting x264

Source

The latest x264 source code is available through git repository:

You can browse the source on-line.

Application binaries

Official builds for Windows, Linux, and MacOSX are available from here.

News

2013 August 23 — The x264 Development Newsletter: Volume 39 is out.

2013 July 4 — The x264 Development Newsletter: Volume 38 is out.

2013 May 20 — The x264 Development Newsletter: Volume 37 is out.

2013 May 4 — The x264 Development Newsletter: Volume 36 is out.

Encoder features

• 8x8 and 4x4 adaptive spatial transform
• Adaptive B-frame placement
• B-frames as references / arbitrary frame order
• CAVLC/CABAC entropy coding
• Custom quantization matrices
• Intra: all macroblock types (16x16, 8x8, 4x4, and PCM with all predictions)
• Inter P: all partitions (from 16x16 down to 4x4)
• Inter B: partitions from 16x16 down to 8x8 (including skip/direct)
• Interlacing (MBAFF)
• Multiple reference frames
• Ratecontrol: constant quantizer, constant quality, single or multipass ABR, optional VBV
• Scenecut detection
• Spatial and temporal direct mode in B-frames, adaptive mode selection
• Parallel encoding on multiple CPUs
• Predictive lossless mode
• Psy optimizations for detail retention (adaptive quantization, psy-RD, psy-trellis)
• Zones for arbitrarily adjusting bitrate distribution

Awards

2010 May 25 — x264 won MSU Sixth MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 Video Codecs Comparison, with ~24% better encoding than second place.

2005 December 26 — x264 won Doom9's 2005 codec shoot-out, passing Ateme by a hair.

2005 December 12 — x264 tied for 1st place (with Ateme) in the second annual MSU MPEG-4 AVC/ H.264 codecs comparison.

Support

For support information and to ask questions, you have the following possibilities:

A mailing list (x264-devel), IRC (#x264@freenode and #x264dev@freenode) and Issue Tracker.

Bugs

Please report any bugs on the Issue tracker.

H 264 Codec Download

If it is a crash, then compile x264 with ./configure --enable-debug and follow the ffmpeg bugreporting guidelines.

Licensing

In addition to being free to use under the GNU GPL, x264 is also available under a commercial license. Contact x264licensing@videolan.org for more details.

Avi Codec For Mac Downloads

Software using x264

H 264 Codec For Quicktime Mac

• …and many more

If you use x264 in another project, let us know!