MPEGHEVC

MPEGHEVC, officially MPEG-H Part 2 and commonly referred to as HEVC or H.265, is a video compression standard developed jointly by the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG). It was standardized in 2013 as a successor to H.264/AVC, offering significantly improved compression efficiency, support for higher resolutions including 4K and 8K, and enhanced features for high dynamic range and wide color gamut content.

The standard introduces Coding Tree Units (CTUs) up to 64x64 as the basic processing unit, replacing traditional macroblocks with larger coding tools and more flexible prediction and transform operations. It supports inter and intra prediction, larger block sizes, and advanced motion compensation, along with in-loop filters such as deblocking and Sample Adaptive Offset (SAO). HEVC also supports higher bit depths (up to 12 bits) and chroma formats up to 4:4:4, and includes features to facilitate parallel encoding and decoding, such as tiles and wavefront parallel processing. Extensions and profiles add scalability and capability enhancements, including scalable HEVC (SHVC) and range extensions (RExt).

Common profiles include Main and Main 10 (10-bit). HEVC has seen widespread deployment in Blu-ray 4K, broadcast standards (DVB), and streaming services, with broad availability of hardware and software decoders.

Licensing for HEVC is managed by multiple patent pools and rights holders, notably MPEG LA and HEVC Advance, which can influence the cost and complexity of deployment in different markets. HEVC remained a dominant codec through the 2010s and 2020s, with newer standards such as VVC (H.266) introduced to provide further efficiency gains.