GENEVA — The new Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard, considered a major advancement in video compression technology which will need only half the bit rate of past standards, is entering the final stage of its standardization process, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) announced Monday.
VVC will be published as ITU H.266—ISO/IEC 23090-3. The VVC standard results from the work of the Joint Video Experts Team (JVET), the latest team to lead the longstanding collaboration of the ITU-T Study Group 16 Video Coding Experts Group and ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11 (Moving Picture Experts Group, MPEG).
VVC will need only half the bit rate of its predecessor “High Efficiency Video Coding” (HEVC, published as ITU H.265—ISO/IEC 23008-2) to achieve the same level of video quality for high-resolution video content. VVC will reduce the amount of data necessary to enable high-quality video for an unprecedented range of new and existing applications.
The compression performance of VVC will enable the delivery of ultra-high definition (UHD) services at bit rates today used to carry high definition (HD) services. Halving the required bit rate for a desired video quality will also ease pressure on global networks, for example by enabling twice as much video content to be stored on a server or provided by a streaming service.
VVC has the flexibility to enable emerging applications such as 360-degree omnidirectional immersive multimedia, remote screen sharing, cloud-based collaboration, cloud gaming, and region-based extraction and merging. It also offers improved quality encoding for UHD and high-dynamic-range (HDR) video as well as conventional video coding applications.
“The video compression algorithms standardized in collaboration by ITU, ISO and IEC continue to enable giant leaps forward in video quality,” said ITU secretary-general Houlin Zhao, in the news release. “They are also central to industry’s ability to meet rising demand for video, the most bandwidth-intensive source of data exchanged over global networks.”
“The completion of VVC is a major milestone for the work of ITU-T Study Group 16, marking the conclusion of the last decade of video coding standardization and the beginning of the next,” added Noah Luo, chairman of ITU-T Study Group 16 (multimedia).
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