Fraunhofer Institute to test h266 codec with German broadcaster WDR

The Fraunhofer Institute and the German public broadcaster WDR will jointly test the h266 or vvc codec in the coming months. That is the successor to h265, or hevc. The new codec should deliver a data saving of 50 percent.

The Fraunhofer Institute states that a 90-minute 4K video that is 10GB in h265 encoding can be saved with the same quality in h266 format with a file size of 5GB. The institute will demonstrate the new codec at the IFA fair in Berlin this week in collaboration with the German public broadcaster. The two sides will conduct more tests in the coming months, but details have not been disclosed.

The h266 standard has been in the works for some time. The Fraunhofer Institute is one of the parties contributing to its development. The standard is expected to be finally released in the summer of 2020. In the course of 2021, the first consumer devices that support the new codec should hit the market. Fraunhofer and WDR say they already have working prototypes.

Vvc stands for Versatile Video Coding and is being developed by the Joint Video Experts Team of the MPEG consortium and the ITU. Vvc will be the successor of hevc, which is an abbreviation of High Efficiency Video Coding. The HEVC standard has been in existence since 2013.

The vvc or h266 codec will compete with the av1 codec in which many companies are already involved. Av1 was created by the Alliance for Open Media, founded in 2015. Netflix, Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and Samsung are part of that alliance, among others.