A new draft standard for video has been agreed upon by delegates of the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) which will revolutionise video for the digital streaming age, since the new standard will halve the size of video files while maintaining the quality. The new standard was decided in order to make bandwidth and download requirements for digital video streaming more manageable.
The old standard for compressed high-definition video, H264, is technically called MPEG-4 Part 10. This will eventually be replaced by the new High Efficiency Video Coding H.265, otherwise known as MPEG-H Part 2.
Meeting organiser, Per Fröjdh, also a manager for visual technology at Ericsson Research says:
“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.”
The move is set to have an enormous impact on the industry as file sizes will be so much smaller. Video data downloads increase every day and are expected to reach up to 90% of total data usage by 2015. Mobile service providers are expected to take up the new format readily, while other services may follow a little more slowly.
Source: NeoWin
Image Credit: Shutterstock, Shutterstock
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Thanks for the info!! :)
Very interesting.
I can save more videos!
Hitting the nail on the head, here! :)
Cool info!
Looking forward to the standard, but I’m not looking forward to re-encoding all my videos.
I’m sure the old standard will still be supported by players for a long time yet.
Yeah, I meant if I want to take advantage of having my files take less space.
thank God for these intelligent men
Interesting. I’m a big fan of h264/x264; my movie collection consists of DVD (400 Mb), 720p (700-850Mb) and 1080p (1.5-2Gb) compressed using this and the results are extremely acceptable. I only keep higher quality files for movies where visuals are important, like outdoor scenery and CGI.
It’ll be at least 5 years though before this gets mainstream – the tools need to be made (ie, x265 hopefully), hardware needs to be updated and a baseline of content needs to be made.
Also, the porn industry needs to start using it to get the ball rolling, lol.
That’s usually where these things gain traction. :)
I wonder if Apple will ease up on mp4 and allow this new format or will I have to encode it like I do now?
MP4 is merely a container. You can have x264 files inside of an MP4 with no problem at all. The reason mkv’s are so popular are the way they handle subtitles, the fact that they can hold pretty much every video and audio stream known to man, and it’s completely open source. Other than that, you can have a video be exactly the same quality, no matter what format, or container it is, as long as it has the exact same video streams inside of it, it really doesn’t matter it it’s mp4 or mkv, the quality should be exactly the same
Thanks for explaining that!
I hope this happens soon so I can start using HD again on Netflix and not worry about getting those rediculous ” you have used 75% of your bandwidth for the month” emails from my isp.
This is exactly why it was invented. :)
This is a good development. Looking forward to H.265. Thanks for the Info!! :)
Looking forward to this change.. let’s see how long it takes to implement this.
Hopefully not too long!
nice move small size best quality