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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday July 07 2020, @01:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the what-the-H.264? dept.

H.266/VVC Standard Finalized With ~50% Lower Size Compared To H.265

The Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard is now firmed up as H.266 as the successor to H.265/HEVC.

[...] Fraunhofer won't be releasing H.266 encoding/decoding software until this autumn. It will be interesting to see meanwhile what open-source solutions materialize. Similarly, how H.266 ultimately stacks up against the royalty-free AV1.

Fraunhofer HHI is proud to present the new state-of-the-art in global video coding: H.266/VVC brings video transmission to new speeds

Through a reduction of data requirements, H.266/VVC makes video transmission in mobile networks (where data capacity is limited) more efficient. For instance, the previous standard H.265/HEVC requires ca. 10 gigabytes of data to transmit a 90-min UHD video. With this new technology, only 5 gigabytes of data are required to achieve the same quality. Because H.266/VVC was developed with ultra-high-resolution video content in mind, the new standard is particularly beneficial when streaming 4K or 8K videos on a flat screen TV. Furthermore, H.266/VVC is ideal for all types of moving images: from high-resolution 360° video panoramas to screen sharing contents.

Versatile Video Coding (VVC/H.266):

In October 2015, the MPEG and VCEG formed the Joint Video Exploration Team (JVET) to evaluate available compression technologies and study the requirements for a next-generation video compression standard. The new algorithms should have 30-50% better compression rate for the same perceptual quality, with support for lossless and subjectively lossless compression. It should support resolutions from 4K to 16K as well as 360° videos. VVC should support YCbCr 4:4:4, 4:2:2 and 4:2:0 with 10 to 16 bits per component, BT.2100 wide color gamut and high dynamic range (HDR) of more than 16 stops (with peak brightness of 1000, 4000 and 10000 nits), auxiliary channels (for depth, transparency, etc.), variable and fractional frame rates from 0 to 120 Hz, scalable video coding for temporal (frame rate), spatial (resolution), SNR, color gamut and dynamic range differences, stereo/multiview coding, panoramic formats, and still picture coding. Encoding complexity of several times (up to ten times) that of HEVC is expected, depending on the quality of the encoding algorithm (which is outside the scope of the standard). The decoding complexity is expected to be about twice that of HEVC.

See also: MPEG: What Happened?
Sisvel Announces AV1 Patent Pool


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:05AM (9 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:05AM (#1017462)

    Every time I see some image compression technique that's supposed to give better results with higher compression ratio, it's always worse. You can't fuckin fake it. That shit always looks low resolution. There was some noise coming from NoCol some years ago about compressive sensing that everyone seemed to buy into. Finally tried it, yep it's worse.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:17AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:17AM (#1017465)

    I'm pretty sure you're encoding it wrong.
    Especially if you're taking an existing compressed video and re-compressing it. You'll never get higher quality than the source and you may get equal quality if you output raw.

    • (Score: 5, Interesting) by takyon on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:24AM (1 child)

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:24AM (#1017469) Journal

      That is definitely not what OP meant.

      But the truth is that newer video codecs do improve quality at a given bitrate or lower bitrate for a given quality. It's just that ~50% lower bitrate could be a best case scenario or the average of a bunch of scenarios. And the percentages provided could be too high if perceptible quality is being sacrificed, which is why there will be plenty of independent tests of the claims.

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      • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @09:08AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @09:08AM (#1017544)

        It depends on the viewer preferences too. I find that some compressed video looks more like computer animation than live action. Everything is rendered flat, it looks false even if the big flat blocks have really sharp edges.

    • (Score: 3, Funny) by driverless on Tuesday July 07 2020, @08:54AM

      by driverless (4770) on Tuesday July 07 2020, @08:54AM (#1017540)

      I'm pretty sure you're encoding it wrong.

      Steve, is that you? Thought you were dead.

  • (Score: 4, Informative) by ledow on Tuesday July 07 2020, @07:25AM (2 children)

    by ledow (5567) on Tuesday July 07 2020, @07:25AM (#1017528) Homepage

    Per-byte, newer video / image compression techniques tend to improve the quality.

    What they don't tell you is that not everybody compresses as much as they could - there are patents on some parts, so you avoid using those unless you want to pay.

    Also, encoding takes a lot of CPU power. Compressing *the best way* isn't always done. For example, live streams of say, outside news broadcasts, are often compressed via some little box running in a van somewhere. It won't be the best. But if you have all the time in the world to prepare the best demo video using the best sources possible, aiming at a very particular target - you can often do full compression that other uses just don't have the time to do.

    Decoding, they'll often just as long to decode and run on any-old decoder and you'll barely notice. It's like spending more time painting a painting in greater detail. Looking at the painting made by the geniuses years of labour to create eye-straining detail with fine brush-strokes takes just as long as some scrawl that's been whacked out by a child.

    Whenever you have a fair comparison, however, the newer compressions are almost always "better" for a given amount of bytes. And the only fair comparison is really "image quality per byte", which is often totally ignored ("Yeah, it looks crap, but it's half the file size" - if it was the exact same size, it would like look far better than other compressions).

    There are many factors, often totally missed by those who are just throwing some home video through a basic, free, open-source reference encoder, leaving every setting default because they don't know when it's appropriate to use them, applying a blanket "profile" of compression to the entire movie (i.e. there may well be some bits that benefit from more frequent key-frames, even hand-picked key-frames) and then wondering why this new protocol that's "50% better" looks slightly worse even though the original file is 52% smaller.

    Fair comparisons are hard, and you have to know what you're doing. And the boxes/software to encode this stuff vary wildly and can be used badly. Your Handbrake codec that you pulled from some site where some guy compiled it in his lunch break from an OS repository isn't going to give you the same quality encoding (or even decoding) as the £50,000 box sold to studios producing master copies of cinema releases - even though both result in the exact some container, with the exact some standardised file format inside and both play on any compatible decoder.

    • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday July 08 2020, @12:30AM (1 child)

      by Grishnakh (2831) on Wednesday July 08 2020, @12:30AM (#1017944)

      I wish there was some tool you could run on a video file to objectively analyze the video quality, so you could determine which version really is better instead of just guessing by looking at the bitrate.

      • (Score: 2) by ledow on Wednesday July 08 2020, @12:42PM

        by ledow (5567) on Wednesday July 08 2020, @12:42PM (#1018160) Homepage

        Sarcasm, obviously... there are dozens. But what are you testing them AGAINST? Again, the same problem. Did you put the right / best setting into the encoder? Was the encoder human-led or just "work-it-out-yourself" automatic? What profile did you run it on? Is that at all reflective of real-world encoded data?

        Because I guarantee you that the benchmarks / source test files that some company will tell you about their encoders are things they've tweaked their algorithm to or know works better than most things.

        Encoders get better over time, fact is that most people just don't use them in the way that maxes out the benchmarks.

  • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Tuesday July 07 2020, @09:08AM

    by TheRaven (270) on Tuesday July 07 2020, @09:08AM (#1017545) Journal
    Back in the '90s, MPEG-1 required two CDs for a film. There were visible artefacts, wallpaper was blurred and action scenes were unwatchable. With modern CODECs, you can fit an HD film in around 1GB. If you think video CODEC qualities haven't improved over the last couple of decades, you have a very poor memory of how bad things used to be.
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  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:33PM

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:33PM (#1017654) Journal

    Your listening wrong. Please crank your mp3 bitrate up to 96 kbps to see if this improves your disposition.

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