Have you ever run out of space that captures some of your cherished moments? Isn’t it annoying? No more hassles, after long research, now you’ll be able to record high-quality 8K videos and 360 degrees videos too. It’s estimated that 90 minutes equivalent to your favorite football match in 4K quality video takes up around ten gigs of space, but with the new technology, you can half it down to 5 gigs only.

Suppose you know that Netflix and YouTube have restrictions over streaming videos, not more than 480p resolution. It has been more than three months now in India; still, the capping exists, although some internet providers did remove it slowly. The social isolation has made people binge more than regular days, seeing an increase of 20 to 30 percent in subscription and user base. More people are now connected, increasing the bandwidth. Hence you may observe slow speeds in this period. Netflix is switching to AV1 codec to save data while watching the show when it delivers its content over the internet. This new research may be able to save more data.

Initially, the digital video started with H.120 encoding but wasn’t practical until H.261 came up based on the DCT (discrete cosine transform) compression. In 1991, MPEG-1 revolutionized the video sector with higher resolutions, which reached us in the form of VCDs and DVDs. In the late 90s and onset of the 21^st century, we saw the currently used MPEG-4 or the most widely used H.264 video encoding. You may know this if you’re familiar with video editing.

After the H.265/HEVC encoding, now steps in H.266/MPEG-I Part 3/VVC (Versatile Video Codec) presented by Fraunhofer HHI with other partners including the significant-tech leading brands like Apple, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Sony, and Intel, with vivid HDR and better support for 360 degrees video. As earlier mentioned, AV1 codec, 30 percent better than H.265, which is adopted by Netflix, is royalty-free. Now, to support H.266 major hardware updates may be required to handle such heavy compressions and will take time for its actual implementation. Like for example, when H.265 was finalized at the beginning of 2013, Apple lately adopted it in the year 2017 as a part of the iOS 11 mobile operating system.

The 500 pages specification document finalized this month on 6^th July 2020, but actual usage in the video industry might take about an estimated 7-8 years. Why do we need such compression? By 2022, more than 80 percent will be part of video streaming, which may increase on more content based on 4K video quality as well as growing numbers of 360 degrees videos. The existing widely used browsers support AV1 codec, but H.266 to properly patent may lately delay web surfing too. Twitch and YouTube may become one of the first firms to implement as they’ve already implanted VP9, again a royalty-free codec by Google itself.

Along with this, MPEG-5 Part 1 or EVC (Essential Video Coding), and MPEG-5 Part 2 or LCEVC (Low Complexity Enhancement VC) is set to launch out. For us, a non-geeky person may visualize it after watching the following graph below.

I hope you could know some of the new ways to encode a video. You can read more about it from their official website: https://www.hhi.fraunhofer.de/en/departments/vca/technologies-and-solutions/h266-vvc.html