MPEG announced the completion of the new Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard at its 131st meeting in July 2020.
VVC is the latest in a series of very successful standards for video coding that have been jointly developed with ITU-T, and it is the direct successor to the well-known and widely used HEVC (Rec. ITU-T H.265 | ISO/IEC 23008-2) and AVC (Rec. ITU-T H.264 | ISO/IEC 14496-10) standards. VVC provides a major benefit in compression over HEVC. Plans are underway to conduct a verification test with formal subjective testing to confirm that VVC achieves an estimated 50% bit rate reduction versus HEVC for equal subjective video quality. Test results have already demonstrated that VVC typically provides about a 40%-bit rate reduction for 4K/UHD video sequences in tests using objective metrics. Application areas especially targeted for the use of VVC include ultra-high definition 4K and 8K video, video with a high dynamic range and wide colour gamut, and video for immersive media applications such as 360° omnidirectional video. Conventional standard-definition and high-definition video content are also supported with similar gains in compression. In addition to improving coding efficiency, VVC also provides highly flexible syntax supporting such use cases as subpicture bitstream extraction, bitstream merging, temporal sublayering and layered coding scalability.
The VVC standard includes the specification of six profiles to serve the needs of industry in a wide variety of applications. These include the “Main 10” profile that supports 8- and 10-bit 4:2:0 video, the “Main 10 4:4:4” profile with 4:4:4 and 4:2:2 format support, corresponding “Multilayer Main 10” and “Multilayer Main 10 4:4:4” profiles with support for layered coding, and the “Main 10 Still Picture” and “Main 10 4:4:4 Still Picture” profiles for still image coding employing the same coding tools as in the corresponding video profiles.
MPEG also announces completion of ISO/IEC 23002-7 “Versatile supplemental enhancement information for coded video bitstreams” (VSEI), developed jointly with ITU-T as Rec. ITU-T H.274. The new VSEI standard specifies the syntax and semantics of video usability information (VUI) parameters and supplemental enhancement information (SEI) messages for use with coded video bitstreams. VSEI is especially intended for use with VVC, although it is drafted to be generic and flexible so that it may also be used with other types of coded video bitstreams. Once specified in VSEI, different video coding standards and systems-environment specifications can re-use the same SEI messages without the need for defining special-purpose data customized to the specific usage context.