Consortium Releases HEVC Successor H.266 and Software Encoders Coming in Fall
A consortium of several companies, organizations and some big names in the tech sector has officially released H.266 or Versatile Video Coding. This video codec is the successor of H.265 or HEVC. Fraunhofer HHI will launch the first software encoders in the fall.
The Berlin-based Fraunhofer-Institut für Nachrichtentechnik, Heinrich-Hertz-Institut, or Fraunhofer HHI for short, says that it has officially released the new standard H.266 or VVC together with partners and that it should be seen as a successor to H.265, also known as High Efficiency Video Coding. The institute says that the new codec is a lot more efficient in terms of the compression algorithm compared to HEVC.
Fraunhofer HHI provides an example of this. Without giving much further details, the institute describes that a 90-minute UHD video in the case of H.265 would yield 10GB of data, but that with H.266 and the same quality it comes out at 5GB. The codec is said to be especially effective with high-resolution video, with the institute specifically mentioning streaming 4k and 8k videos. High dynamic range and 360-degree videos are also supported.
The Berlin Institute was also involved in the development of its predecessors, H.264 and H.265. As with those codecs, the new H.266 will also be accompanied by license costs, for example when companies want to build support for the codec into their hardware. Fraunhofer HHI speaks of a uniform and transparent licensing model, in which the Frand principle will be respected. That stands for fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory. It means that a patent holder indicates that he is prepared to make the patents whose technology ends up in a standard available to interested parties, by granting a license to use the patents under reasonable conditions.
New chips that can encode videos using H.266 are currently being developed, according to Fraunhofer HHI, and the first software encoders, likely to be labeled X.266, will follow in the fall. How dominant or popular these hardware and software implementations will become will depend, among other things, on the associated licensing costs and the transparency involved. That was and is an important criticism of HEVC; it is on the expensive side and it was not always clear to whom exactly you had to pay, partly due to the different IP owners and the different licensing groups out there. To simplify that licensing process, the Media Coding Industry Forum has been established, which includes more than thirty organizations and companies.
The success of H.266 will also depend in part on the performance and popularity of the alternatives. Google has developed the vp9 compression standard and applies it to YouTube, although Netflix also uses it for streaming to mobile users. This codec from Google is in fact the counterpart of H.265, but there is also a new, more efficient codec on the way: av1. This standard was developed by the Alliance for Open Media. Both Google and Apple are part of it, along with many other big names such as Netflix, LG, Microsoft and Samsung. H.266 will probably perform somewhat better than av1, but the latter has the advantage that the technology is released under an open source license and can therefore be used without having to pay royalties.
The consortium behind H.266 consists of Fraunhofer HHI, the Video Coding Experts Group, the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and several big names from the technology sector. These include Apple, Ericsson, Intel, Huawei, Microsoft, Qualcomm and Sony.