ITU agrees new HEVC standard for video

The ITU has agreed on the creation of a new standard for High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), the next-generation compression technology that could see a halving of bandwidth requirements for video over the current H.264 standard.

The ITU-T Study Group 16 has agreed the first stage of approval for the standard, formally known as H.265 or ISO/IEC 23008-2, a product of collaboration between the ITU’s Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) and the ISO/IEC Moving Pictures Expert Group (MPEG).

The new standard includes a ‘Main’ profile that supports 8-bit 4:2:0 video, a ‘Main 10’ profile with 10-bit support, and a ‘Main Still Picture’ profile for still image coding that employs the same coding tools as a video ‘intra’ picture.

The ITU/ISO/IEC Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC) will continue work on extensions to HEVC, including support for 12-bit video as well as 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 chroma formats, according to the ITU. HEVC will also progressively be moved towards towards scalable video coding, and the three bodies will also work within the Joint Collaborative Team on 3D-Video (JCT-3V) on the extension of HEVC towards stereoscopic and 3D video coding.

“ITU-T H.264 underpinned rapid progression and expansion of the video ecosystem, with many adopting it to replace their own proprietary compression codecs. The industry continues to look to ITU and its partners as the global benchmark for video compression, and I have no doubt that this new standard will be as effective as its predecessor in enabling the next wave of innovation in this fast-paced industry,” said Hamadoun I Touré, secretary-general of the ITU.