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[xStoyax]

Fraunhofer, the German company that helped develop the H.264, H.265 and MP3 encoding formats, has unveiled a new video encoding standard that could severely reduce streaming bottlenecks. Called H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC), it’s specifically designed for 4K and 8K streaming and reduces data requirements by around 50 percent compared to H.265 HEVC (high-efficiency video coding). At the same time, the improved compression won’t compromise visual quality.

The company developed the codec in collaboration with partners including Apple, Ericsson, Intel, Huawei, Microsoft, Qualcomm and Sony.

Fraunhofer said that if a 90-minute, H.265/HEVC-encoded movie is about 10GB, it would only be 5GB for the same quality when encoded with the new codec. “Because H.266/VVC was developed with ultra-high-resolution video content in mind, the new standard is particularly beneficial when streaming 4K or 8K videos on a flat screen TV,” Fraunhofer said. At the same time, it will support all formats from 480p on up.

Once implemented, VVC could allow a stark reduction in traffic from services like Amazon Prime Video, Hulu and Netflix. Video streaming takes the lion’s share of the world’s internet bandwidth, something that’s become starkly apparent in the COVID-19 era. Because of the jump in traffic during pandemic lockdowns, services like Netflix and YouTube agreed to reduce default streaming rates to take the strain off web infrastructure.

At the same time, streaming services could use VCC to offer higher 4K HDR quality without increasing bandwidth, given the more efficient compression. The new system will also be indispensable once 8K video — with quadruple the bandwidth requirements of 4K — enters the mainstream.

Source: https://www.engadget.com/h266-vvc-codec-4k-streaming-data-half-133047705.html

For the tech heads around here....could this potentially help gaming services like xCloud & PSNow?
I know several articles mention streaming content to places like Youtube & Twitch and some of the talks I've come across have talked about games. But haven't seen anything particularly focused on how if at all this could effect next generation. Any insight would be helpful.

 

[DetectiveBananas]

 

[Valonquar]

 

[YCoCg]

For the tech heads around here....could this potentially help gaming services like xCloud & PSNow?

As long as server side encoding equipment is set up with the newer codec and the target device also gets updated to support the newer codec then yes, it will lower the entry point for 4k60 Streaming.

 

[StreetsofBeige]

I'm not in tech and science, but always cool to see people come up with advances in tech.

As someone who sits in an office all day doing emails and spreadsheets, I'd have no idea where to start figuring out how to chop data usage by half and maintain quality.

My biggest job is analyzing numbers which the root of it comes from all the stuff our R&D team makes.

Seems a lot harder to innovate new products than analyzing numbers to maximize company financials.

 

[Birdo]

Great news. The current ones are getting long in the tooth.

 

[M1chl]

As long as server side encoding equipment is set up with the newer codec and the target device also gets updated to support the newer codec then yes, it will lower the entry point for 4k60 Streaming.

Computational expectation for client and server probably going to be way bigger. Besides how much frames you store before you send them onto client? Because if it's just few frames, then you are saving fuck all....because these codes works based of consecutive frames, so if you encode 10 frames, you are saving way less memory, then if you are encoding 1000 frames in buffer, because you have to start. How are they called B-frames? I don't know and it's too late for me to go somewhere on the internet to get the name of picture with full quality. from which are next frames derived from.

Source: https://www.engadget.com/h266-vvc-codec-4k-streaming-data-half-133047705.html

For the tech heads around here....could this potentially help gaming services like xCloud & PSNow?
I know several articles mention streaming content to places like Youtube & Twitch and some of the talks I've come across have talked about games. But haven't seen anything particularly focused on how if at all this could effect next generation. Any insight would be helpful.

So based on upper part of my post, I would not hold my breath.

 

[RPS37]

Hearing this is dope coming from someone who’s capped out at like 20Mb/s on his internet.

 

[DetectiveBananas]

 

[PhoenixTank]

As long as server side encoding equipment is set up with the newer codec and the target device also gets updated to support the newer codec then yes, it will lower the entry point for 4k60 Streaming.

Add in the licensing fees and associated clusterfuck from that while we're at it.

Some year old info from BBC tests:

Testing AV1 and VVC

After a year of work on a codec optimised for streaming, processing time appears to be dropping significantly.

www.bbc.co.uk

Bitrate reduction comes at quite a cost, but has probably improved since then (AV1 has)

Appparently MPEG are also finalising two other codecs this year.

Inside MPEG's Ambitious Plan to Launch 3 Video Codecs in 2020

The pace of innovation is getting faster and the demands on video codecs are getting greater. MPEG's three-part plan answers questions of royalties, licensing, and computational efficiency. Meet VVC, MPEG-5 Part 1 (EVC), and MPEG-5 Part 2 (LCEVC).

www.streamingmedia.com

EVC & LCEVC which shouldn't be encumbered as heavily by patent BS.

 

[The Pleasure]

Is the picture going to look better? Because 4k streams look worse than good 1080p blu rays.

 

[FeldMonster]

I'm not in tech and science, but always cool to see people come up with advances in tech.

As someone who sits in an office all day doing emails and spreadsheets, I'd have no idea where to start figuring out how to chop data usage by half and maintain quality.

My biggest job is analyzing numbers which the root of it comes from all the stuff our R&D team makes.

Seems a lot harder to innovate new products than analyzing numbers to maximize company financials.

As someone on the R&D side, I do agree that it is hard to innovate new products, but typically, the number of ideas greatly outnumber the time and resources to pursue them, so someone in your position is also quite valuable in helping to focus efforts to get the best bang for your buck.

 

[jakinov]

Source: https://www.engadget.com/h266-vvc-codec-4k-streaming-data-half-133047705.html

For the tech heads around here....could this potentially help gaming services like xCloud & PSNow?
I know several articles mention streaming content to places like Youtube & Twitch and some of the talks I've come across have talked about games. But haven't seen anything particularly focused on how if at all this could effect next generation. Any insight would be helpful.

Maybe. I've heard that in the past the more advanced/efficient encoding algorithms require significantly more compute power. So in attempts to save bandwidth they could be adding latency (maybe negligible, maybe not) to your games. For non-live stream you encode once and distribute it; so adding to the encode time doesn't have an effect when distributing. Added latency to a live stream like Twitch isn't a huge deal if you save money or get better quality for only being a seconds (or maybe less) behind. But part of the ongoing bandwidth savings can also help pay for offsetting the additional overhead by upscaling CPU or shoving in custom hardware to help make the compression more efficient.

 

[CamHostage]

I don't know, expanding on what Jakinov said, it's not just significantly more compute power, it's SIGNIFICANTLY more compute power. I did an H.265 project for home use (I'm not so handy with video) and, while H.264 comes out reasonably quickly, I got tired of waiting for my H.265 project and went to bed.

Most video streaming capture cards you get are still 264 even now, I assume that's for a reason (though it's also because the royalty structure is a f'ng mess.) From the little of what I know of encoding, I'd tend to agree with Michi that you're not going to get another 50% improvement easy (H.265 was capable of halving over similar H.246 encodes,) as I would assume the greatest savings would be across multiple frames compressed together rather than the rapidly-delivered frames of a live stream. It'll be interesting to see how the new format works out, but I imagine it's primary purpose will be for pre-encoded material like streaming video sites (and also videogame cutscene compression.)

It'll also require totally hardware, according to the press release (particularly for mobile; a good PC will be able to render it in software and that'll work out however it does, but videocards will have to have it in mind to add H.266 encoding/decoding native support to really take the most advantage. And the move from H.264 to H.265 apparently required 10X the compute power to deal with, so we'll need some nice machines to do something here.

If you're looking for the future of livestream video quality, btw, check out the link hoenixTank shared about LCEVC. That codec can give you a significant savings comparable to H.265 in a streaming environment (though it's a weird combination of two different layers of video simultaneously rather than a single progressive image processed against the image stream for savings, so I'm not sure how the differences stack up,) More importantly, it's hugely faster to compress over H.265, so it requires considerably less beefy hardware to get the job done. If your video device can already play H.264, you might be able to play LCEVC content, because it uses old codecs as one of the layers in its composite video stream.

In the article, the journalist talked with somebody at Twitch about LCEVC, so they're already on it if it turns out to be the way to go.

 

[Kerlurk]

Gaming Discussion

Video game news, industry analysis, sales figures, deals, impressions, reviews, and discussions of everything in the medium, covering all platforms, genres, and territories.

www.neogaf.com

 

[CamHostage]

You can actually test out a version of the LCEVC video format on your own Android device now and see if you like it. The app V-Nova.Perseus is a testing app that uses the preliminary version of this format (V-Nova is the sole provider of this format for MPEG.) They don't have much content on there anymore (seems like when they launched the app, they had a bunch of movie trailers, but now it's the standard free-CGI movies like Big Buck Bunny), but there are some different encodes to see the comparisons. Even their 500 Kbps looks fairly acceptable IMO, and by the time you get up to 3 Mbps (which is what Youtube uses for its 1080p streams,) you've got some pretty nice-looking streaming video I would say.

(*That's half the Youtube equivalent bitrate, although looking at the same footage on YT, their codec handles this CG real well as well.)

I do really wish the trailers and live-action content was still on their app (they also are supposed to have a stream of the channel Ski TV to I believe see a consistently-live TV source in the app, but it's not working)

V-NOVA - Apps on Google Play

Cross-media codec format for video. Ensures the broadest reach @ maximum quality

play.google.com

 

[Red Rackham's Revenge]

I hope streaming services would double bit rates rather than maintain the same shitty quality for half the data.

 

[CuNi]

The issue slowly creeps in that encoding times start to take longer and longer with those codecs as more and more sophisticated steps need to be done to keep reducing the bandwidth without sacrificing quality.
So were either looking at longer and longer encoding times or more and more silicon that is needed for those codecs. I feel like in the future, more and more of those codecs will get relevant for big streaming services like Netflix/Amazon Prime where you can spend some time encoding your content and serving it to many users instead of using it for things like streaming/live content.