H265/HVEC support in Win11

mke · April 30, 2025, 1:43am

I have a Lenovo Win11 laptop with Ryzen 7535U CPU. “HEVC Video Extensions from Device Manufacturer” were installed by Lenovo out of the box. The AMD driver is up to date. As is Jami.

H265 does not appear in the list of available Video codecs. What do I miss?

According to the internet this CPU has the necessary hardware support. I booted the machine into Fedora and there Jami lets me select the H265 codec. That’s why I don’t think that it is a hardware problem.

mmms · April 30, 2025, 7:42pm

Can you share a screen copy ? Here is what is see on my Win11 / Jami. I added the Jami version in the top part of the image:

mke · May 1, 2025, 1:49am

Thank you for the answer!

I think I figured out where my problem comes from. I overlooked a line at the top of the Windows
Store page that says that “HEVC Video Extensions from Device Manufacturer” is not supported on my device. It was installed, but not working.

I am not sure how to proceed from here. As mentioned in the first post, the CPU can support it. A search on the Internet brings up all kind of ways to install the H265 codec on Windows. I tried a few libraries. They do not enable support in Jami and are probably made for video players. There are also the “HEVC Video Extensions” on the Windows store. But they cost money and I am not sure if they would solve the issue.

mmms · May 1, 2025, 2:34am

I never tried it, but found that there is an open source libde265 HEVC codec. Maybe have a look there: https://www.libde265.org/ Not sure that this will enable H265 in Jami you might have to try.

mke · May 1, 2025, 3:52am

That was one of the libraries I tried.

This page mentioned it: Free Download HEVC Codecs on Windows 10 for H.265 Videos
and linked to this Github: Releases · strukturag/LAVFilters · GitHub

Pretty old and it didn’t work with Jami.

I know that libde265 is installed on my Linux machines and I read somewhere that you need it on Linux to make Jami support H265.

Rubus_chiliadenus · May 1, 2025, 10:11am

I believe it’s caused by build configuration.

github.com/savoirfairelinux/jami-daemon

contrib/src/ffmpeg/windows-configure-make.sh

2cd49b282

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set +x
set +e
DIR=$( cd "$( dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}" )" && pwd )
cd $DIR/../../build/ffmpeg
FFMPEGCONF='
            --toolchain=msvc
            --target-os=win32'

#disable everything
FFMPEGCONF+='
            --disable-everything
            --disable-programs
            --disable-d3d11va
            --disable-dxva2
            --disable-postproc
            --disable-filters'

FFMPEGCONF+='
            --enable-static

This file has been truncated. show original

Neither AMF nor software HEVC codec was enabled for windows.

However, VAAPI was enabled for linux, so you can select HEVC on fedora.

github.com/savoirfairelinux/jami-daemon

contrib/src/ffmpeg/rules.mak

2cd49b282


      
          	--enable-vaapi \
          	--enable-hwaccel=h264_vaapi \
          	--enable-hwaccel=mpeg4_vaapi \
          	--enable-hwaccel=h263_vaapi \
          	--enable-hwaccel=vp8_vaapi \
          	--enable-hwaccel=mjpeg_vaapi \
          	--enable-hwaccel=hevc_vaapi \
          	--enable-encoder=h264_vaapi \
          	--enable-encoder=vp8_vaapi \
          	--enable-encoder=mjpeg_vaapi \
          	--enable-encoder=hevc_vaapi

I guess mmms have a Intel GPU or a Nvidia GPU, because Intel quick sync, NVENC and NVDEC were enabled.

mke · May 1, 2025, 12:12pm

Thank you for the explanation!

hkk · May 1, 2025, 12:59pm

H265 augmente la bande passante du réseau utilisée par la vidéo

Rubus_chiliadenus · May 1, 2025, 1:56pm

@Jami Will next windows release enable AMF for AMD GPUs?

mmms · May 2, 2025, 1:04am

Yep, a venerable Zotac GTX 1660 that I flashed for free as a MSI 1660 Super and that works A+++ since many years (nasty nasty Nvidia market segmentation…). A perfect cheap H.265 card for Jami. I will not advice anybody to do that because you can risk killing your GPU if not done properly (in that case you can still use your GPU to turn the eggs in a frying pan…).