The H.266/VCC standard, a new video codec that can reduce the weight of movies and TV series viewed in streaming by 50%, has been unveiled
A quantum leap in encoding efficiency. That’s how the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute describes its latest video compression standard: H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VCC). A standard that, according to the German institute, could revolutionize the world of streaming.
The H.266/VCC standard is the successor to 2013’s High Efficiency Video Coding (H.265/HEVC), itself the successor to 2003’s H.264/MPEG-4 AVC. According to the Fraunhofer HHI, VVC can reduce the size of a 90-minute video at 4K resolution by 50%: from 10 GB with H.265/HEVC encoding to just 5 GB with H.266/VVC encoding. And this opens up a world of possibilities, because when applied to streaming, this standard halves the connection speed needed to transmit video in UHD resolution. In perspective, then, VVC makes future 8K video much more manageable. In addition, the new standard has features designed specifically for streaming.
H.266/VVC codec: the best for streaming?
In addition to the consistent reduction in the size of video files, the VVC codec has other advantages. It can be used from 480p resolution up to 8K, it supports HDR color, adaptive resolution reduction (when there is not enough data bandwidth for streaming, a lower resolution video is sent) and tile-based streaming (i.e. the division of the frame in different “tiles”, with different quality and compression). All this, according to the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute, makes the H.266 codec the ideal format for the streaming of the future.
H.266/VVC, AOMedia AV1 or MPEG 5: who will win?
The H.266/VVC format is not the only one competing for the crown of the best standard for video compression in this decade: there are also AOMedia’s AV1 and MPEG 5. The former was developed by the Alliance for Open Media, a consortium whose founders include Google, Mozilla and Cisco (and in fact Google uses AV1 for 8K streaming on YouTube). Compared to the old HEVC, AV1 is able to achieve a compression up to 40% higher and has the advantage of being free (but there is a legal dispute about it).
The MPEG 5 is instead supported by Huawei, Qualcomm and Samsung and promises 25% more compression than HEVC and in the basic version is royalty free. VVC, finally, will be offered under a FRAND (Fair, Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory: you pay, but not too much) license and has a big limitation: it requires dedicated hardware for file compression and decompression.