H.264, HEVC and VVC video coding contributions

Fraunhofer HHI in Berlin helped lead and shape the video compression standards behind streaming, Blu-ray era HD and 4K TV, from H.264/AVC to HEVC and the 2020 standard VVC.

Made by: Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft
From: Munich, Bavaria
Category: Software & AI
Introduced: 2003

What it is

Every video you stream is compressed. The dominant family of standards, H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC and H.266/VVC, was written jointly by the ITU and the ISO/IEC MPEG groups. The Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI) in Berlin has been one of the most influential contributors throughout.

How it works

A codec splits each frame into blocks, predicts most of each block from parts of the same frame or earlier frames, and sends only the difference, transformed and squeezed with entropy coding. Each generation predicts more cleverly with more flexible block shapes. H.264 needed roughly half the bits of earlier standards for the same quality; VVC, finalised in July 2020, targets a further 50 per cent saving over HEVC.

Why it stands out

HHI's Thomas Wiegand was one of the four leaders of the Joint Video Team that created H.264, alongside Gary Sullivan of Microsoft, Ajay Luthra of Motorola and Jens-Rainer Ohm of RWTH Aachen, and he edited the specification. The team won a Primetime Emmy for Technology and Engineering in 2008 and a second, Daytime Emmy in 2009. HEVC earned the joint team behind it a further Primetime Emmy in 2017. For VVC, HHI's Benjamin Bross served as editor of the standard, and the institute hosted the reference software repository and contributed partitioning, transform coding and prediction tools. Much of the early work was funded by the federal research ministry.

Where you meet it

H.264 still runs in video calls, phones, cameras, broadcasting and streaming; HEVC carries much 4K and HDR content; VVC is entering broadcast and streaming encoders.

The pattern is typical of German research: HHI does not sell cameras or streaming services, but its engineers sit in the committees that decide how every device encodes and decodes video, and its patents and software enter products through standards.

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