Intel has stopped developing and supporting the popular H.265/HEVC video codec

Intel has officially announced that it will no longer develop the high-performance, open-source H.265/HEVC video encoder known as SVT-HEVC. This project was part of the Intel Scalable Video Technology (SVT) initiative and was optimized to run on Xeon Scalable and Xeon D processors.

Image source: Copilot

The decision to discontinue development of SVT-HEVC came as a surprise to many video coding experts. Michael Larabel, founder and editor-in-chief of the Phoronix resource, drew attention to the lack of project updates for a long time. The latest release dates back to 2021, and the project repository has been switched to read-only mode. Upon closer examination, it turned out that Intel has officially completed work on SVT-HEVC. The following notification about the termination of work on the project appeared on the project page on GitHub:

Image source: phoronix.com

Although SVT-HEVC demonstrated superior performance on Intel Xeon-based servers as well as AMD EPYC and other x86_64 hardware, the existence of other high-quality open source encoders such as x265 and Kvazaar likely made further development of SVT-HEVC impractical.

It is worth noting that the fate of another Intel project – SVT-VP9 – within the framework of the SVT initiative remains unclear. The SVT-VP9 GitHub repository is still managed by the Intel Open Visual Cloud account, although the last updates were made four months ago and the last official release dates back to 2020.

Meanwhile, the SVT-AV1 project, also originally developed by Intel, was transferred to AOMedia and continues to develop successfully outside the company.