I've been experimenting with x265 via ffmpeg, encoding some TV episodes in HEVC. My experience is that it takes 3.5-7 seconds of CPU time to encode 1 second of video. (These are things like 576x432 resolution at roughly 700 kbps, or 704x528 resolution at 530 kbps.)<p>As for decoding performance, VLC appears to use 30-50% CPU when playing these videos back. (Haven't tried one at uber-high resolution yet.) As far as I'm concerned, if it's fast enough to never stutter, then that's the biggest goal it needs to hit, and beyond that, reducing power consumption is desirable but not too important.
I believe YouTube's VP9 videos are all tiled, so its a shame to not see data for that type of file.<p>I was looking the other day and was pleasantly surprised by the amount of VP9 content (does it really take them a day to encode a minute of VP9?). The article's numbers also confirm my impression that the VP9 decodes where not much harder on the CPU than the H.264 ones.<p>I believe Chrome switched to ffvp8 for VP8 decode. I wonder if they'll do it again for ffvp9.
HEVC decoder libde265 works well with even 4k Videos. There is a gstreamer plugin for easy test <a href="http://www.libde265.org/blog/2014/02/22/gstreamer-4k-h265-hevc-plugin/" rel="nofollow">http://www.libde265.org/blog/2014/02/22/gstreamer-4k-h265-he...</a>