I am pleased to announce that ITU-T SG16 just declared official Consent on Recommendation ITU-T H.266 Versatile Video Coding (VVC). Consent on H.266 was declared at 1353 UTC (1553 local time in Geneva, 3 July 2020). VVC, which will also become ISO/IEC 23090-3 upon approval in the ISO/IEC approval process, is the latest in a series of very successful such jointly developed ITU-T Recommendations and International Standards for video coding, and is the direct successor to HEVC (Rec. ITU-T H.265 | ISO/IEC 23008-2) and AVC (Rec. ITU-T H.264 | ISO/IEC 14496-10). VVC provides significant coding efficiency improvements over HEVC. Plans are underway to conduct a verification test with formal subjective testing to confirm that VVC achieves about a 50% bit rate reduction vs. HEVC for equal subjective video quality. Test results have demonstrated that VVC provides about a 40% bit rate reduction for 4K/UHD test sequences 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, as well as conventional standard-definition and high-definition video content. 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.
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