According to an announcement by Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute, a new video compression standard has been released: H.266, also known as Versatile Video Coding (VVC). The impact of this new standard is that the size of videos that are encoded with the VVC specifications (whether saved as a file or streamed over the internet) will be significantly smaller than videos that are encoded with older specifications.
The predecessor to H.266/VVC was H.265 which is also known as High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). H.266/VVC compresses videos to approximately half the size as H.265/HEVC, assuming the same quality settings. Prior to H.265/HEVC, we had H.264 which is also known as Advanced Video Coding (AVC) or MPEG-4. H.265/HEVC compresses videos to approximately half the size as H.264/AVC. Prior to that, we had MPEG-2. And you guessed it, H.264/AVC compresses videos to approximately half the size as MPEG-2.
Although we have a new H.266/VVC specification, it will take some time for developers to widely adopt it. In fact, even though the H.265/HEVC specification was released in 2013, it was announced at WWDC 2017 that Apple would begin to support it. The September 2019 Bitmovin Video Developer Report shows that 91% of developers implement H.264/AVC, whereas only 43% of developers implement H.265/HEVC.
I would imagine that there will be a similar lag time for the adoption of H.266/VVC. However, given that I don’t have a burning need to stream 4K or 8K videos, I think I can wait several years for it to be adopted into the mainstream.
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