I think the files will get smaller, but the hardware to encode and decode them will be a lot more complex, expensive and probably power-hungry.

A lot of the 10-bit H.264 videos out there are smaller than they would be if the same people had released them with 8-bit encoding. At some point, the quality difference between the encoded version and the source video becomes negligible, so it's natural to expect that better compression would result in smaller file sizes for any given raw source.

The time when this doesn't apply is when you're currently losing a noticeable about of video quality to keep file sizes down. Say that you're a movie streaming service, and you want to stream a fairly new movie. You have it at very high resolution, but if you wanted to stream it at Blu-Ray quality, that would really eat up your bandwidth, so you decrease the file size to something you're comfortable with, and get as much quality as you can within those limits. Better compression, in that case, would mean either better quality at the same file size, or bandwidth savings at the same quality, or some combination of the two.

So: I would expect this to make pirated TV rips smaller, pirated Blu-Ray rips larger or smaller (depending on what the encoding is optimized for), and streaming video either higher quality or smaller, depending on your connection speed and how much bandwidth they're willing to pay for.

Users will vote with their feet. It was remarkable how much the filesizes of videos from certain sources fell in the aftermath of the Thai floods and increased consumer hard drive prices.

Of course, there's a class of users who will just always find the largest video file possible, reasoning that it much be higher quality.

I'd say that's a good possibility, for now. Consider when Apple rolled out 1080p downloads - the filesizes were only slightly larger than for the previous 720p versions, representing quite an efficiency boost. Adopting H.265 would seem to be able to chop the sizes down.

However:

- tablets and phones are unlikely to be able to take advantage of H.265 until the requisite GPU support arrives. This may hold up widespread adoption for a year or two.

- for how long will the video arena remain at 1080p? I hear Sky (UK satellite broadcasting arm of the Murdoch empire) is trying to nudge toward 4K broadcasting.

> representing quite an efficiency boost.

It's a somewhat backwards way of thinking about it. They chose the filesize and then set the dials for the encoding. They could have chosen the 720p to be smaller larger or the same size compared to 1080p.

I'm curious what kind of hardware will be required for playback-- my homebrew'd Wii already has trouble playing back highly compressed h.264 videos. I wonder how much more power will be required to decode high-motion scenes in real time with h.265?

I don't think the files will get larger before the displays get larger. I haven't seen many QHD (quad Full hd) or UHD (16x Full HD) displays. I think you can buy them only in Japan now. But even the new mac book display has by far not enough pixels for that, so i doubt this will ever be adopted on laptop screens, it just seems unreasonable, nobody will be able to tell the difference.