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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: 4, Touché) by jasassin on Tuesday July 07 2020, @03:27AM (11 children)

    by jasassin (3566) <jasassin@gmail.com> on Tuesday July 07 2020, @03:27AM (#1017490) Homepage Journal

    I just got a video card that can hardware decode X265 and not even a month later the assholes come out with 266.

    Brassifrackin sackarackin long eared low down varmits!

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday July 07 2020, @03:41AM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday July 07 2020, @03:41AM (#1017495) Journal

    I don't think it's going to be included in many products before 2022.

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by richtopia on Tuesday July 07 2020, @05:18AM (8 children)

    by richtopia (3160) on Tuesday July 07 2020, @05:18AM (#1017515) Homepage Journal

    Not like H265 is used very much. The bottom link to the MPEG: What Happened dives into what has happened with the MPEG group and how H265 never reached the pervasiveness that H264 and MPEG-2 achieved.

    I think AV1 is the next critical codec to target hardware around. Even ignoring the open patents, the major players include content providers and browser makers (founding members Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla and Netflix). With the industry moving to streaming AV1 will be optimized for the use-case and supported by all parts of the content delivery network. Hardware makers are absent from the founding members, but there are already chips being released with encode and decode support. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1#Hardware [wikipedia.org]

    The next couple years will really see some competition between the different formats being released. Even if the MPEG group's codecs are technically superior, they are going to have an uphill battle to climb.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday July 07 2020, @12:25PM (5 children)

      Yup. A new standard codec more than once every decade or so don't fly in the market. MPEG->Divx/Xvid->H.264 is pretty much how it's gone so far as standard, consumer-used video compression goes, with a brief shout-out to MPEG-2 for the short span that DVDs were relevant. Over the span from before Windows 95 or Linux even existed until today. Hardware and people's give-a-shit just is not going to keep up with the current pace of video codec advancement.

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      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by digitalaudiorock on Tuesday July 07 2020, @01:17PM

        by digitalaudiorock (688) on Tuesday July 07 2020, @01:17PM (#1017606) Journal

        Totally. I tend to think that those who are developing these new codecs think everyone's chomping at the bit for a newer/better codec, when for the most part, they just want a codec that their shit can actually play.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:30PM (3 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:30PM (#1017653)

        I still use mpeg2 a lot because it is the only format I can cut with frame accuracy and only reencode the GOP fragments with dvbcut.

        • (Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday July 07 2020, @03:18PM (2 children)

          Ouch, that's pretty brutal. Also not really true anymore. Nowadays you can do frame accuracy with H.264 or H.265, get a hell of a lot better quality:size ratio, and still only have to reencode the GOP(s) you chopped. Have a look at FFMediaToolkit for example.

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          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @04:35PM (1 child)

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @04:35PM (#1017753)

            Interesting project, but I didn't see anything there about finding GOP boundaries and just do copies of those, nor on how sound was being handled.

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @06:01PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @06:01PM (#1017793)

      Aren't all UHD Blurays encoded using H265/HVEC? "Not used very much" is a bit of a stretch.

      • (Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday July 08 2020, @12:39AM

        by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday July 08 2020, @12:39AM (#1017946) Journal

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_HD_Blu-ray [wikipedia.org]

        Sales of UHD Blu-ray players have been modest compared to older-generation video disc players, based on official US sales data from the Consumer Technology Association (CTA). Peak sales occurred in 2017 with 884,000 units sold, and sales have declined in the years since, as have all disc player sales. Meanwhile, previous generations of disc players sold in excess of four times as many units per year as did UHD Blu-ray.

        Various consoles come with UHD Blu-ray drives (PS4 Pro did not, bizarrely), but the discs are competing with streaming services. The lack of H.265 in streaming services, browsers, etc. is its biggest failure:

        https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=141678 [streamingmedia.com]

        Chiariglione wouldn't comment directly for this article, but has made his thoughts clear in his many writings. Reflecting upon MPEG's successes in "A future without MPEG," he writes, "MPEG has gambled for 30 years, sometimes winning, sometimes losing." Clearly, he considered MPEG-2 and AVC/H.264 wins, writing that "MPEG LA developed the MPEG-2 Video license. MPEG-2 was widely used" and "MPEG-4 AVC is a very successful standard that can proudly bear the "generic" attribute because it is used for broadcasting and online streaming as well."

        On the other hand, HEVC was a loss, at least as it relates to streaming. In the same article, Chiariglione writes, "After 7 years, MPEG-H HEVC patent holders could not get their acts together and propose a decently unified license. HEVC is used in broadcasting, however, use for streaming is limited at best." Also regarding HEVC, in "A crisis, the causes and a solution," he wrote: "At long last everybody realises that the old MPEG business model is now broke, all the investments (collectively hundreds of millions USD) made by the industry for the new video codec will go up in smoke and AOM's royalty-free model will spread to other business segments as well."

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  • (Score: 2) by stretch611 on Tuesday July 07 2020, @09:57PM

    by stretch611 (6199) on Tuesday July 07 2020, @09:57PM (#1017898)

    As for hardware decoding, it really isn't necessary if you have a recent CPU.

    I had an old linux box with a dual core processor (and integrated graphics) that was from 2008. (and it was a value AMD product from the time, not top end.) It had no problem at all with playing 1080p h.264 movies at all. It did stutter and fail on h.265 though.

    But every other computer I had, even a 8 year laptop (admittedly quad core Intel i7 w/nvdia card) was able to play h.265 without a problem. It would probably be slow as crap encoding h.265, but decoding was not an issue at all.

    As for availability of h.265 I have seen it start to appear regularly on various pirate sites. It is not nearly as widespread as h.264, but it is out there and growing in popularity.
    Personally, *if* I were to partake in those illegal downloads, (which of course I would never do,) I would not have an issue downloading h.265 because a 2-4GB h.265 file appears to give me the same quality as a 10-16GB h.264 file. Of course, this is to my naked eye... not scientific, and really would never happen, because I would never download something illegally, nor even know where to find such a place to find illegal files.

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