10-bit H.264 Support [Archive]

parent5446

24th December 2011, 19:10

Is there any official tracking on support for 10-bit H.264? Because (correct me if I'm wrong) compatibility seems to be the only reason to still be using 8-bit x264. I cannot seem to find much information on which players support it or not.

Blue_MiSfit

25th December 2011, 01:42

I'm not aware of a single consumer hardware player that can play 10 bit H.264. Even professional players are a bit hard to come by (and very expensive), and would usually be targeted at AVC Intra in any case, which is more of a high end acquisition / editing format.

If you're using a software player, you shouldn't have any problems. DirectShow players like MPC-HC will get either native support, or ffdshow support (among others). The only sore spot is that if you've been using DXVA / CUDA or any other kind of GPU accelerated decoding, this won't work with 10 bit H.264.

So, if you really don't care about hardware playback or GPU accelerated software playback, by all means go for 10 bit H.264. I for one an concerned with these things, so I haven't experimented much. Others report very good things, however!

Derek