New video standard introduced by MPEG, HEVC to bring same H.264 quality with half the Load

On topic, off topic, or somewhere in between. You can decide how relevant this news is on your own. MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group) has just introduced a new video standard called HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) or for a shorter term that you will likely see it referred to more, H.265. The next step in video coding will be twice as efficient as the current H.264, achieve the same visual quality and use half the bandwidth. To put that in less technical terms, it means you could easily double the amount of TV shows or Movies streamed and still use the same amount of data doing it.

“There’s a lot of industry interest in this because it means you can halve the bit rate and still achieve the same visual quality, or double the number of television channels with the same bandwidth, which will have an enormous impact on the industry”… Fröjdh believes that the HEVC format discussed by MPEG in Stockholm could be launched in commercial products as early as in 2013… “It will take time before it’s launched for a TV service, but adoption is much quicker in the mobile area, and we’ll probably see the first services for mobile use cases next year,” he says.

Like with any new technology, it isn’t available just yet. With carriers constantly putting limits on data usage and many people having to forgo watching another episode of Warehouse 13 because they can’t afford to use more data this month, this is going to be awesome. As  Ericsson Research Manager for Visual Technology Per Fröjdh said, the mobile industry is much quicker to adopt and it should be landing in devices early next year.

On a side note and purely from my perspective. H.264 generally seems to be a smaller file size as well. Meaning converting large videos to H.264 takes up less space when stored on your phone or tablet. If the new H.265 standard offers the same video quality at half the bandwidth, is if safe to assume the overall file size will also be smaller than H.264? I hope so. Maybe one of our readers can clarify that a bit for us.

Source: Ericsson via 9to5Google