HEVC

HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding, sometimes called H.265) is a new video compression format and is the successor of H.264. It was formalized on the 25th of November 2013 and published as ISO/IEC 23008-2:2013. Work on the open source HEVC decoder and encoder (x265) is still being done, but a proposed implementation of the codec has been made available.

Support in XBMC
XBMC v12.3 "Frodo" and the upcoming XBMC v13 "Gotham" do not support HEVC encoded videos. Attempting to play HEVC encoded material will result in a black screen with only audio playing.

Assuming all goes well, the first stable version of XBMC with HEVC support will most likely be v14.

Support in FFmpeg
The FFmpeg maintainers included support for the proposed version of the HEVC decoder in FFmpeg version 2.1.

This version of FFmpeg is not in use in the most recent builds of XBMC and, since we are not allowing any more new features to go in to v13 'Gotham' development (we are in feature freeze), this feature will not make it into XBMC 13.0. We are, of course, planning to upgrade FFmpeg to a higher version but this will happen after 13.0 has been released.

Planning
A first test to upgrade the internal FFmmpeg to the latest version resulted in a severe memory leak which caused 16GB of memory usage within 20 minutes. Obviously these issues need to be resolved before you will see a version with FFmpeg 2.1, and there are developers working on it, but the main focus at this point in time is on releasing XBMC 13.0 'Gotham'

By the time the HEVC encoder is finalised and people start using it widely there will be support for it in XBMC, but at this moment we are not there yet. Therefore the best suggestion is to avoid using this encoder for the moment if you intend to play your creations with XBMC.

Hardware acceleration
There are very few hardware video decoding options out on the market right now, which means that any HEVC decoding, XBMC or not, will require a fairly recent and powerful desktop-class processor.