Windows 10 gets h265 codec and supports mkv containers

Microsoft will offer an h265 codec in Windows 10 by default, which will allow the user to play 4k videos, among other things. In addition, the successor to Windows 8.1 must be able to handle video material that is stored in mkv containers.

The arrival of the codec in Windows 10 has been announced in a tweet from Microsoft employee Gabriel Aul. The h265 codec, also known as high efficiency video coding, is the successor to the widely used h264 codec, which is widely used for HD videos. With the new codec, video material of the same quality can be compressed on average by a factor of two better than with h264. As a result, the HEVC codec lends itself well to 4k video and in theory it can also be used to compress 8k video material. By including the codec in the operating system by default, all installed applications, including browsers, are able to use it.

It is still unclear whether the h265 codec that Microsoft will include in Windows 10 will also support future GPUs with built-in hevc hardware acceleration, although that is likely. In the coming months, the first GPUs with this feature are expected on the market. It is also unknown whether Microsoft’s hevc codec supports the main still picture profile, which is designed to compress images.

In addition to h265 support, Microsoft previously announced that Windows 10 can also handle the mkv format. These containers are popular for video content, and the mkv format offers, among other things, the ability to package several soundtracks and subtitles into a single file.

Windows 10 will also support the lossless flac audio format, so that such music files can now be opened in Windows Media Player, among others.