Low Bandwidth, High Quality H.265 Video Gets Standards OK

January 28, 2013 by Dave Haynes

In what’s kind of a big deal for ops guys and people who pay the bandwidth bills, the International Telecommunication Union has approved the H.265 video encoding standard, which means the same piece of video can have its file size reduced by half without compromising quality.

So if you are moving a lot of video out to a retail digital signage network, data caps or bandwidth meters start to be less of an issue. The new standard is the successor to the widely used H.264 video encoding standard (aka Mpeg4), which is used for most video delivery these days.

The standard has been a long time in coming and is intended primarily to deal with the steadily increasing demand to move full HD video out to devices as small as smart phones and tablets – something that now chews up a ton of traffic on wired and wireless network.

This is a technical standards process, so don’t start asking for or expecting h.265 to be all set to use this week or anytime particularly soon.

Reports InfoWorld:

On Friday, the ITU-T’s Study Group 16 gave first-stage approval to H.265, informally known as HEVC (High-Efficiency Video Coding). Work continues on extensions to the standard, which eventually may include 3D video encoding. Companies including Broadcom, Ericsson, and Mitsubishi have shown implementations of the new standard, the ITU said. 

Last August, Ericsson announced what it called the first live TV video encoder compatible with H.265. It predicted that the product, called the SVP 5500 HEVC encoder, would first be used to deliver TV over mobile networks.

Propeller-head stuff: http://www.itu.int/net/pressoffice/press_releases/2013/01.aspx#.UQad2kpdfiQ