Fraunhofer HHI has announced the new H.266 coding standard. According to Fraunhofer HHI’s press release, the H.266 standard was primarily developed by researchers at Fraunhofer HHI, with strong support from industry partners including Apple, Ericsson, Intel, Huawei, Microsoft, Qualcomm and Sony.

To develop this latest-generation video coding standard, ITU-T and ISO/IEC MPEG jointly established a video coding development team named JVET (Joint Video Exploration Team) in October 2015, just as the two organizations collaborated on developing the H.264 and H.265 standards. Core members of JVET come from the Fraunhofer HHI research institute.

JVET launched the research and formulation of the H.266 coding standard in April 2018. The new standard is officially named Versatile Video Coding (VVC). Its ITU-T designation is H.266, and the corresponding ISO/IEC standard number is ISO/IEC 23090-3.

JVET operates with Fraunhofer HHI as the leading institution. The H.266 standard was finalized in July 2020, and Fraunhofer HHI took the lead in releasing this specification.

It is widely recognized that Fraunhofer HHI Institute has undertaken most of the core development work for both H.264 and H.265 coding standards.

Versatile Video Coding (VVC), formally designated H.266 by ITU-T and referred to as MPEG-I Part 3 or Future Video Coding (FVC) by MPEG. Meanwhile, MPEG has released two derivative standards based on H.266: MPEG-5 Part 1 (EVC) and MPEG-5 Part 2 (LCEVC. The pre-released official documents of H.266 on the ITU-T website are only available for member download, making authoritative and detailed public materials relatively scarce. Based on publicly available information, the key capabilities of H.266 are summarized as follows:

It is expected that the encoding complexity of VVC is several times up to ten times that of HEVC, while decoding complexity is approximately twice that of HEVC.

Compared with H.265/HEVC, H.266 can save roughly 50% bitrate without degradation of video quality.It achieves versatility through efficient encoding for a wide range of video content and application scenarios.