H.266 Versatile Video Codec
Image Credit: The Fraunhofer Institute
The electrical engineering and computer science division of the esteemed German research organization, The Fraunhofer – Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI), has just announced VVC, a new video CODEC standard that promises to provide an additional 50 percent compression efficiency in streaming video compression.
The codec’s, full name is H.266/Verstaile Video Coding and HHI claims that it can provide a streamed 4K image quality that has the “same perceptually quality”, meaning that the human eye shouldn’t be able to perceive any differences in image quality, to that achieved from the HEVC CODEC for a 50% reduction in bit rate.
With companies like Samsung, Sony, LG, Netflix and Amazon Prime Video adopting this new CODEC, and with no royalty fees, it looks possible to take over from the current unpopular royalty fee driven CODECS like the industry-standard H.264/Advanced Video Coding (AVC) and H.265/High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) formats. These two CODECS support almost 90% of the video transmission and compression on the market today being released in 2003 and 2013 respectively.
This is a very significant leap in coding efficiency and is the result of three years of work by HHI and its industry partners Apple, Ericsson, Intel, Huawei, Microsoft, Qualcomm and Sony, and has been developed with ultra-high-resolution video content in mind, including 4K, 8K and HDR.
Even though royalty free it is still subject to a license fee from manufacturers, so only time will tell just how widely this new CODEC is adopted.
It’s not clear to what extent AV1, AVC, HEVC, and VVC will all coexist in the future but H.266 hardware and CODEC software is currently being developed for commercial release later this year.
The Fraunhofer Society is comprised of many smaller institutes like Fraunhofer HHI which is best known in the world of digital media standards as the creator of MP3. It also contributed heavily to the creation of H.264 and H.265. So the research organization certainty has a very strong pedigree and success story working in data compression. It should be noted that Fraunhofer does not make any mention in its press release of the existence of AV1, an open-source and royalty-free competitor to the HEVC standard. It was created by the Open Media Alliance, which includes all five major US tech giants after Apple signed on in early 2018. AV1 and its predecessor, VP9, are integral for streaming 4K content on platforms like YouTube, so it’s unlikely that these standards will be going away in the near future.
If this new CODEC actually delivers what it is promising, and I have no reason to believe that it won’t based upon HHI’s pedigree and experience in video compression, it would potentially mean that the current UHD Blu-ray disc capacity could support a feature length 8K movie. Yes, new hardware and firmware will be required for players, but when mass produced we all know just how inexpensive that can become. The question is will the movie houses and manufacturers have a desire to re-tool for a whole new set of 8K releases and will the market (disc media buying public that is shrinking at an alarming rate) be receptive to purchasing all these movies again in 8K after just buying them all again in 4K? Especially when such high resolutions have little visual benefit except on huge screens and/or at very close viewing distances.
I have to say that I am very unlikely to be one of those plastic disc buyers who will be purchasing a new 8K; receiver, player, projector and of course my 8th set of the Star Wars movies, in 8K!!
See here for the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI) press release.
