Sony FMP-X5 will add 4K HEVC streaming support to older 4K Bravias

4K TVs are slowly growing in popularity but to enjoy them to their fullest potential, you’ll need a good 4K video source. Sony’s 2012 and 2013 4K TVs don’t have native HEVC decoding, but the company is correcting this oversight with the new FMP-X5 player.


The Sony FMP-X5 decodes 4K HEVC video and sends it to a 4K Bravia TV over an HDMI cable.
Sony’s 4K TVs support from this year support HEVC natively, but you’ll need the FMP-X5 for the KDL-84X9005 and KD-65X9005A / 55X9005A TVs. You can buy the player for €400 / £350 from Sony’s online store starting in August.
The player works with streaming services, but also features a USB port to play media from an external storage. Note that there’s no build-in hard drive like the FMP-X10 (released in the US) has, so you can’t directly download movies from Sony’s Video Unlimited.
The HEVC standard (aka h.265) is still quite new and in fact it hasn’t been finalized yet. Still, it’s already being used in a couple of places, including Netflix. The video streaming service used HEVC to stream its popular House of Cards series this year.
HEVC is more efficient than AVC (aka h.264) and will use less bandwidth than it, vital for slower or data-capped connections. House of Cards, for example, was streamed at 15Mbps.
Note that YouTube also offers 4K video streaming, but that uses the VP9 codec. The FMP-X5 doesn’t support that one, 4K Sony projectors are also not supported, but Sony is looking into adding it later.