After sorting out HEVC playback, I ran into a new problem: playing this stuff in VLC is laggy as hell. Did some digging and found a few pretty depressing results. HEVC needs hardware decoding to guarantee absolutely smooth playback and low usage. My CPU is Broadwell, so hardware decoding is rough, and on top of that it’s a Linux environment — rough on top of rough. Put simply: not supported. The libraries VLC’s support calls into need at least Ubuntu 16.04 to basically work, and I just rolled back from 16.04. So is there no way out? Of course there is — just switch players.