For years the HEVC (H.265) was considered a very popular video codec. Now a group of experts, some of whom are developers at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany, has brought a successor onto the market. A decisive advantage of the new codec is said to be a bit rate reduction of up to 50 percent.
A new standard in video coding
Now the IT expert group has successfully launched the new Versatile Video Codec (VVC) as a new standard in the video codec market. This valuable information was announced by the Fraunhofer Institute itself. This means that the fifth official generation of codecs in the field of video codecs is now seeing the light of day. The VVC is thus the successor of the HEVC (H.265), which represents the fourth generation of video codecs from the so-called MPEG research group.
The improvements
It is not without reason that the Fraunhofer Institute calls the new video codec the biggest improvement in the developments of the MPEG research group so far. Praiseworthy is not only the astonishing reduction of the bit rate by up to 50%. For example, the VVC makes it possible to compress a 90-minute film in UHD resolution to just 5 GB in size. The predecessor still needed about 10 GB of storage space. The reason for the lower storage space is the adaptation to the 4K standard. So if you want to produce mainly videos in this resolution or even 8K resolution, you will be happy with the new VVC.
Three years development time
The group around the Fraunhofer Institute and the Moving Pictures Expert Group (MPEG) has already started the development of the video codec in 2017. In addition to the two technical experts, the Joint Video Exploration Team (JVET) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) were also involved in the development. The reduced bit rate was discovered relatively quickly by the large development team. This was incentive enough to bring the VVC to the market-ready stage as quickly as possible.
Alternatives and patent disputes
Not everyone relies on the video codecs of the MPEG group. So interested people can also use the video codec of Aomedia without any problems. A decisive advantage of the provider is a free patent license. Thus everyone can access the video codec. In general, the market of video codecs is characterized by a conspicuously high number of disputes. These almost always revolve around disputes between patent consortia. There are three different consortia alone that make a claim to the video codec HEVC. In this respect, there is another advantage of the new VVC. After all, a completely new consortium has emerged around the new codec. This should defuse the dispute about the HEVC a bit.
