Several developers have started the development of an opensource H.265 / High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) encoder. The project, called Kvazaar, is an initiative of academics of the University of Tampere (Finland) which also funds the development. The project doesn't implement all features of HEVC, but the developers promise that compression performance will increase as they add more coding tools.
HEVC is the successor of the popular H.264 codec and is used to compress 4K video streams. On average HEVC should be able to compress files and streams 50% better than H.264. While HEVC isn't used much yet, it's expected that the codec will rapidly see an increase in popularity the coming years.
Besides the already commercially available HEVC encoders, the development of the opensource encoder has now started on the opensource project hosting site Github. The Kvazaar encoder should be licensed under GNU GPLv2. The developers state they work on supporting x86 and x64 Windows and Linux.
The goal of the developers is to achieve coding efficiency close to the HEVC reference encoders and easy portability to other platforms which indicates the codec might also be ported to other, now unsupported, operating systems.
Many parts of the HEVC specifications are not or partly implemented in Kvazaar. The developers will also need to implement more optimizations. According to main contributor Marko Viitanen it will take about a year before the encoder is mature enough for mainstream usage.
Development of the encoder is possible because the HEVC is an open and public standard, originally publicly developed by the JCT-VC.
The name comes from the Finnish word for Quazar, which is, according to Wikipedia, " a very energetic and distant active galactic nucleus".
