H.266/VVC Officially Revealed, Same Quality As H.265/HEVC At Half The Bit-Rate

[Uskompuf]

Fraunhofer HHI today revealed their latest video compression standard H.266/Versatile Video Codec (VVC), which is set to eventually replace the current H.265/HEVC standard. The new standard was developed by Fraunhofer HHI in partnership with industry partners including Apple, Ericsson, Intel, Huawei, Microsoft, Qualcomm, and Sony. The standard follows previous iterations promising a 50% reduction in bit-rate while maintaining the same quality.

Fraunhofer HHI claims that the new standard will play a major role in video transmission and storage however it is unknown if companies and consumers will adopt the standard. HEVC was released back in 2013 but is only now seven years later starting to see significant support, Fraunhofer plans to release the first software encoder/decoder this spring while hardware chips will likely take much longer. The major streaming giants such as Google and Netflix will likely determine when or if the standard becomes mainstream.



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[Muaadib]

Small typo, HEVC not HVEC.

 

[progste]

let's see how long it takes for it to take off, I'm curious to see if it delivers on its promise.

 

[Uskompuf]

Small typo, HEVC not HVEC.

Cheers, fixed it up.

 

[ncrs]

let's see how long it takes for it to take off, I'm curious to see if it delivers on its promise.

According to Wikipedia the licensing situation for VVC is complicated and not very clear yet, which doesn't work in its favour. AV1 is way safer for the media giants to invest in because of this.

 

[watzupken]

"The standard follows previous iterations promising a 50% reduction in bit-rate while maintaining the same quality. "

I am skeptical about this statement. Something has got to give to retain "same quality" while reducing bit rate, especially when its a 50% reduction.

 

[Mussels]

Oooooh, i look forward to seeing this built into TV's in 10 years!

 

[Vya Domus]

Something has got to give to retain "same quality" while reducing bit rate, especially when its a 50% reduction.

Compute effort has to give, the more sophisticated the encoding/decoding the more powerful/dedicated hardware you need. Most people don't remember this but MPEG-1 used to be so bad no PC from the era could decode it, you needed special hardware.

 

[Mussels]

"The standard follows previous iterations promising a 50% reduction in bit-rate while maintaining the same quality. "

I am skeptical about this statement. Something has got to give to retain "same quality" while reducing bit rate, especially when its a 50% reduction.

Compare all the previous gens to each other - you can quite easily see the trend has come true over the years that they trade higher compression for higher CPU and RAM requirements for playback (and thus they use hardware acceleration to play them)

 

[Rowsol]

Wow, very nice. I'm a heavy h.265 user. I try to get all my stuff in that format. Judging by the 4x increase in encode time from 264 to 265, I'm sure this will see a further 4x increase or more. It looks like threadripper has a purpose now.

 

[Aerpoweron]

Unless they make the royalty situation way more easy, i don't see any chance that this will be relevant any time soon.
It is kind of sad to see nice tech behind a complex paywall. Especially since it is funded by tax money for the universities that develop it.

 

[Khanivore]

"promising a 50% reduction in bit-rate while maintaining the same quality"

Sounds really good. Hopefully new generation of CCTV NVRs will adopt H266.