Currently, the massively most efficient codec used on the market is HEVC , although AV1 is slowly making its way onto streaming platforms like Netflix. Making a massive change to a new codec is not an easy task, since it requires hardware decoding of its content to reproduce it with little consumption of resources. Now, they have shown how efficient the new codec to succeed HEVC (H.265) is.
We are talking about VVC , short for Versatile Video Coding . This codec is also known as H.266 , and as a successor to H.265 it has a lot of work ahead of it. Much of the industry is currently looking at AV1, which is more efficient than HEVC, but with the advantage of being an open codec.
VVC is even better than AV1
AV1 is better than HEVC, but VVC is better than AV1 . The codec is already finalized, and the first studies are being carried out to verify its efficiency. The key to VVC will not only be an improvement for 4K content, but also for 8K, which currently has no efficient way to compress, making it four times as large as HEVC.
Occupying four times more than HEVC requires having a very high bandwidth to view content in that resolution, as well as making it difficult to put a movie in that resolution on a Blu-ray without the bitrate not being drastically reduced. Therefore, it is key that compression algorithms are improved.
The first televisions that can decode VVC using hardware are expected to hit the market within the next year; especially among the 8K, which are the ones with the most advanced technologies today.
Up to 41% less bitrate with VVC
So in the latest testing of 8K content, VVC can reduce bitrate by up to 41% compared to HEVC , while maintaining the same image quality. Depending on the metric used, the bitrate improvement can go to figures of between 26 and 35%, but it is still a significant improvement.
The bitrate in 8K content changes a lot depending on the type of scene, hence there is so much variability. In fact, in the sequences analyzed, the figures obtained ranged from 11 Mbps to 180 Mbps .
The creators of the study also did the test of displaying content in 4K and 8K without compression to see if it was possible to notice a difference with the naked eye. There, they realized that this difference depends on the type of content that is being seen on the screen, since in certain situations there is not really a significant difference in the quality of the content. In the following graph, from 2020, we can see how VVC improves, although the AV1 figures are somewhat outdated because the codec has improved in the last year and a half:
This again opens the debate of whether it is really necessary to opt for 8K when, at present, there is hardly any content in that resolution, televisions are too expensive, and the difference of using that resolution is really difficult to appreciate at the distances that we use them. , since it is necessary to have one of more than 75 inches to notice a difference less than 1.5 meters.
For the tests they used an 85-inch Sony KD-85ZG Smart TV , and they sat really close (80 cm) to analyze the 6 video samples in 8K at 60 FPS.
