The Media Coding Industry Forum (MC-IF) says it welcomes the completion of Versatile Video Coding (VVC). VVC is a new video coding standard with improved compression performance and efficient support for new video formats such as High Dynamic Range and 360° video.
VVC is the successor to HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) and H.264/AVC (Advanced Video Coding). It was developed jointly by VCEG (ITU-T Q6/16) and MPEG (ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 11) in a collaborative effort involving more than 50 organizations, many of whom are MC-IF members.
The VVC standard was consented by ITU-T Study Group 16 on July 3, 2020, to be published as ITU-T Recommendation H.266. Concurrently, MPEG submitted the VVC standard for Final Draft International Standard ballot, to be published as ISO/IEC 23090-3. VVC efficiently encodes high fidelity video including Ultra HD picture resolutions of 4K and 8K, often at half the bitrate compared to HEVC while maintaining the same visual quality.
VVC defines multiple profiles for various use cases including multi-layer coding and still picture coding. VVC also includes the ability to signal constraint flags and sub-profiles, to enable interoperability of VVC implementations that do not support the full capabilities defined in the VVC profiles.
MC-IF is offering a VVC sub-profile registration service to industry, to encourage interoperability by ensuring that MC-IF registered sub-profiles are well-motivated, clearly specified, and published. The service, managed by MC-IF’s Profiling Work Group, enables organizations to register a VVC sub-profile using an MC-IF terminal provider code for ITU-T T.35.
MC-IF membership is not required to register an MC-IF VVC sub-profile. By offering this registration service, MC-IF hopes to improve transparency and interoperability of sub-profiles used by different institutions. Information about the process for registering sub-profiles with MC-IF is available at https://www.mc-if.org/profiling-work-group.
The MC-IF Interoperability Work Group is gathering input from industry on which interoperability, testing, and implementation activities are of most interest to developers and users of VVC. Interested parties are invited to respond to the survey at https://www.mc-if.org/interop-work-group.
