If You Liked H.265 HVEC You Will Love H.266 VCC
Today the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute, everyone’s current favourite provider of codecs, announce the successor to their popular H.265 codec and the benefits it will offer. H.265 did a very good job of compressing video streams without overly compromising quality, you could expect to use no more than 10GB of your data plan to stream 90 minutes of video at the highest resolution your device can manage. The new codec will cut that in half, needing only 5GB of data to accomplish the same task.
The codec was designed not just to be friendly on your data plan, the increased compression is also going to make streaming 4K and 8K video much more feasible. Amazon Prime and Hulu already make use of H.265 and are likely to be eyeing the new codec closely. Netflix is still playing with H.264 but may consider this a good reason to move to a new codec which is much friendlier to the new high definitions customers are coming to expect.
You shouldn’t expect to see the codec become mainstream any time soon though, the H.265 standard was completed in January 2013, but was not really common to find until four years later. We can hope that this time the adoption is quicker, as it will greatly improve streaming on multiple platforms. You can follow the link from Slashdot to learn more about the 500 page document detailing the new standard if you so desire.
Apple adopted the predecessor to the new codec, H.265/HEVC, in iOS 11. The updated video codec, which was developed after years of research and standardization, will bring a number of tangible benefits to future iPhone users. In its announcement, the Fraunhofer HHI said that H.266 will reduce data requirements by around 50% thanks to improved compression.
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I thought Netflix was leaning more toward going to AV1 (and its successor) since HEVC licencing is such a mess. (and if the HEVC licensing is as bad as they say, VCC is bound to be just as bad)
True, but are also playing with HVEC too. Wasn’t thinking about the licensing this morning but that will make it more interesting, won’t it?
I never trust when people say that the new compression is better without additional or perceivable loss in quality after watching 720p on Youtube repeatedly get worse and worse.
What’s up with those avatars?
Can you guys do a deep dive into how encoding works, focusing on the methodology/mathematics required to keep or increase quality while lowering the file size?
you can pull from Gravatar if you want a fancy personalized one. That would certainly be an interesting topic, I will kick some butts and see if anything comes out.