H.266/VVC Has Arrived

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.

Video Conversion with HandBrake

I recently wrote about My Digital Content Workflow, and in step 7 I describe how I had been using Xilisoft Video Converter to resize videos from 1080p ("full HD") to smaller sizes like 720p ("HD"). Given that a new version of HandBrake (0.10.0) was released just 2 days ago, I thought I'd give it another look. HandBrake is traditionally known for being used as a DVD ripping application, so I had never seriously considered it for video conversion, although it has had those capabilities for quite some time.  With release 0.10.0 comes several new encoding schemes which I'll probably never use, but it's nice to know that the developers are staying current with newer codecs like H.265 (even if it is still in early development at this stage).

For a vast majority of my needs, I will generally start with a preset and make further adjustments from there.  For example, the iPad present defaults to a 720p resolution, and I might just modify the bitrate to achieve a level of quality that is suitable for the contents of the video that I am converting. I find that a bitrate of 5000 kbps results in pretty good quality, especially for viewing on mobile devices and YouTube, although it is possible to get away with 3000 kbps or less if the video does not contain a lot of fast-moving images.

Overall I'm pleased with HandBrake as a video conversion tool, and given that it is free, it is hard to beat HandBrake in terms of value.  Furthermore, HandBrake is available for both Mac and Windows (and Ubuntu, if you're into that).  If you have any other recommendations for video conversion, I'd like to know!