VLC does not support hev1

Problem

I tried to play a MP4 file using VLC and it threw up this error:

No suitable decoder module:
VLC does not support the audio or video format "hev1".
Unfortunately there is no way for you to fix this.

Solution

That surprisingly pessimistic error message is wrong. hev1 is the HEVC/H.265 standard, which is a new video compression standard that is getting popular for high DPI content. All VLC needs is a decoder plugin for it.

There is a PPA that provides this decoder, so installing it is easy:

$ sudo apt-add-repository ppa:strukturag/libde265
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt install vlc-plugin-libde265

These video files should play correctly after installing this decoder.

Tried with: VLC 2.1.6 Rincewind and Ubuntu 14.04