With the new release of SVT-AV1 2.2, hacks started asking about the absence of recent updates for SVT-HEVC. In reply, Chipzilla confirmed that it has officially terminated SVT-HEVC.

The SVT-AV1 project had already been transferred to the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) project, with one of its lead maintainers having joined Meta from Intel two years ago. While SVT-AV1 continues to thrive outside Intel, SVT-HEVC (and SVT-VP9) have remained Intel open-source projects, but SVT-HEVC has officially ended.

SVT-HEVC had not seen a new release since 2021, and several open-source H.265 encoders, such as x265 and Kvazaar, are already available. A few weeks ago, SVT-HEVC upstream was discontinued. The GitHub repository has been set to a read-only state, and the discontinuation notice reads that Intel will no longer maintain this project.

Intel has ceased development and contributions to this project, including, but not limited to, maintenance, bug fixes, new releases, or updates.

Intel no longer accepts patches to this project and if anyone wants to do anything about it they will have to fork off.

SVT-HEVC performed excellently on Intel Xeon servers, AMD EPYC and other x86_64 hardware.

SVT-VP9 does not have any discontinuation notice at this time. The SVT-VP9 GitHub repository remains under Intel's Open Visual Cloud account, although it has not seen any new commits in four months, and the last tagged release was back in 2020.