Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

The Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute, the electrical engineering and computer science division of the esteemed German research organization, on Tuesday announced VVC, a new video codec standard that promises to bring around 50 percent efficiency gains in streaming video compression.

The codec’s full name is H.266/Versatile Video Coding, as Fraunhofer says it’s designed to be a successor to the industry-standard H.264/Advanced Video Coding (AVC) and H.265/High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) formats that combined make up about 90 percent of global digital video transmission and compression on the market today. While HEVC was first released in 2013, the codec has proved controversial due to aggressive patent disputes from its various…

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