Evolution of Video Codec

The first practical video codec is H.261, created in 1988 by ITU. Due to the limit of hardware resources, the first video codec can only support 4:2:0 sampling CIF 352x288 and QCIF 176x144 videos.

In 2003, H.264, also known as AVC, was introduced by Joint Video Team (JVT), a cooperative group from ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) together with the ISO/IEC JTC1 Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). AVC is still the most wide spread video codec standard today. It supports various video quality from low to high bit depth, bit rates and resolution up to 8192x4320 (8K).

In the following years, the MPEG and VCEG established a Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC) and in 2013, HEVC, also known as H.265, the successor of AVC, was announced. It achieves 50% bit rate reduction compared to H.264. It also targets market of 4K/8K videos. However, due to the patent and licencing issues, until today, HEVC is still not widely adopted like AVC.

At the same time, Google also developed their own video codec standard,known as VP8/VP9, to avoid huge licencing fee from HEVC. In 2015, big companies including Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Netflix, etc, formed Alliance of Open Media(AOM) to develop a royalty-free video codec as an alternative to H.264 and HEVC. In 2016, AOM announced the new video codec standard, AV1. After two years of development, the bitstream format was finally frozen in June, 2018.

video codec timeline [bitmovin]

On the other hand, in 2015, ITU-T VCEG and ISO/IEC MPEG again together formed the Joint Video Exploration (JVET) to prepare another standard. After the call for proposals, it became the Joint Video Experts Team (also JVET) in 2018, and announced the new video coding standard, Versatile Video Codec (VVC). It aims for 8K videos and other applications such as 360- degree video and virtual reality. The standard is expected to be finalized by 2020.