ITU approves H.265 encoding standard

The International Telecommunication Union(ITU) has approved the new HEVC standard for high-quality, low-bandwidth video encoding.

HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding), also known as H.265, is an ISO/IEC video standard. Planning for it began in 2004, shortly after the development of H.264 was completed, and over the past few months the topic has had quite an impact on the industry.

This new H.265 will require half the bit rate (data transfer rate) of its predecessor H.264/AVC, without reducing quality levels. It is intended for high-quality video transmission, such as the arrival of 4K in the home, or streaming of Full HD content to mobile devices, such as smartphones or tablets, and to the web.

Three profiles have been included:

– “Main“: for 8-bit, 4:2:0 video.
– “Main 10“: adds support for 10-bit (4:2:0).
– “Main Still Picture“: uses the same intraframe compression tools as HEVC for still images.

Support for 12-bit as well as 4:2:2 and 4:4:4:4 color sampling is expected to be added in future codec extensions. In addition, an extension with tools for stereoscopic video encoding is also being planned.

H.265/HEVC technology has already been implemented in demonstrations by companies such as Ateme, Broadcom, Cyberlink, Ericsson, Fraunhofer HHI, Mitsubishi, NHK, NTT Docomo or Qualcomm. However, there are discussions about the entry of this codec in the industry. On the one hand, the bandwidth savings is a plus for certain transmissions, but it comes with increased computation, so devices supporting H.265 will be more expensive. If you are interested in these discussions you can read this article from StreamingMedia.com in which they state that it will take a few years for it to become established as a standard.

Through this link you can learn more about H.265; and here is the information given by the ITU.