MPEG Drafts Standard for New HEVC Video Format That Halves File Sizes

The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) has drafted a standard for a new video-compression format that delivers the same quality as H.264 but takes half the bandwidth, reports ITWire.

The draft, High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC also known as H.265 and MPEG-H Part 2), announced today, was agreed on at an MPEG meeting in Stockholm in July attended by 450 delegates from the telecoms, computer, TV and consumer electronics industries convened to approve and issue the new standard.

Organiser of the meeting, Per Fröjdh, who is a manager for visual technology at Ericsson Research, said this will have "an enormous impact on the industry."


"There's a lot of industry interest in this because it means you can halve the bit rate and still achieve the same visual quality, or double the number of television channels with the same bandwidth," he said.

"The availability of a new compression format to reduce bandwidth, particularly in mobile networks where spectrum is expensive [and] paves the way for service providers to launch more video services with the currently available spectrum."

The format could be implemented as early as 2013. It will likely be adopted for mobile use first.

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