Tencent pioneers H.266/VVC commercialization for cloud services

On July 19th, Tencent Cloud announced that its transcoding and related media processing applications have supported the H.266/VVC standard, and its players and other products support H.266/VVC decoding, helping users to save storage and bandwidth cost while maintaining video quality, enhance the audiovisual experience of UHD video.

Released in 2020, H.266/VVC is jointly developed by the International Organization for Standardisation (ISO), the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and the ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T). Tencent was an active participant in the setting of H.266/VVC standard, with over 100 technical proposals adopted by the expert team. Tencent will continue to advance the research and development of H.266/VVC technology and products, with a focus on the production, distribution and playing of videos.

Compared to the H.265/HEVC and H.264/AVC standards, currently widely used in the industry, H.266/VVC’s compression performance is significantly improved, reducing video file sizes by 50% without compromising the quality. Many from the industry believe that the widespread use of H.266/VVC will greatly alleviate global bandwidth pressure as well as overcome major obstacles in the storage and transmission of 4K/8K UHD videos.

H.266/VVC can also provide applications such as screen content, screen sharing, cloud collaboration and cloud gaming with specialised encoding tools, facilitating computer-generated content.

In November 2020, less than six months after the finalisation of the first version of the H.266/VVC standard, Tencent optimised 266 decoder and made it available across its platform and launched the ARM-optimised decoder for iOS/Android platforms. With comprehensive module performance optimisation and outstanding parallel processing design, Tencent has achieved real-time decoding of 1080p single core or 4K multi-core code stream with H.266/VVC standard. The function is available on all platforms, including Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS, laying a solid foundation for Tencent’s future businesses.

In terms of encoders, Tencent’s 266 encoder is now able to support all major tools in the H.266/VVC Main 10 Profile at the same time. This means that users can switch on the same platform freely, significantly saving the development and testing time.

Dr. Liu Shan, Distinguished Scientist and General Manager of Tencent Media Lab, believes that the advent of codec technology development would benefit from a healthy ecosystem. “It is exciting to see that our in-house development of H.266/VVC codec is adopted by RT-ONE™, helping to bring more advanced video experience to millions of users.” said Liu, “We will continue to drive H.266/VVC development and productization.”

“With the help of RT-ONE™, Tencent’s audio and video infrastructure network available worldwide, Tencent Cloud has reached 90% of the audio and video customers in China,” said Li Yutao, Vice President of Tencent Cloud. We have always been helping our partners across different industries by sharing cutting-edge technologies with them. With the latest H.266/VVC technology, Tencent brings even more potential to both the existing audio and video business and applications to come in the future.” Streaming Media