Using H.265 (HEVC) on Ubuntu

If you google search how to install H.265 on ubuntu you get a a bunch of posts that describe how to add a PPA for the necessary files.

However the repository hasn't been updated since 2015 (vivid vervet)

If you try to use the vivid repo then things fail because of dependency issues.

But not to worry as it seems that H.265 is now included in the standard xenial repository.

apt-cache search x265
libx265-79 - H.265/HEVC video stream encoder (shared library)
libx265-dev - H.265/HEVC video stream encoder (development files)
libx265-doc - H.265/HEVC video stream encoder (documentation)
x265 - H.265/HEVC video stream encoder

So, all you need to do is;

sudo apt-get install x265

and you are good to go.