HEVC stands for ‘High Efficiency Video Coding’ and is also known as H.265. HEVC is a recently developed video compression standard pioneered by the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC).

This HEVC compression standard was developed to double the compression efficiency of the previous standard, H.264/AVC, and at typical consumer video distribution bitrates, HEVC has been largely successful in doing so and is the supported coded for the emerging Ultra HD Blu-Ray format. However, compression efficiency results will always vary according to the type of content and the encoder settings.

The power of most video compression standards is derived from a technique called motion compensated prediction. This technique encodes blocks of pixels by referencing another area in the same frame (called intra-prediction) or in another frame (called inter-prediction). HEVC/H.265 is an improvement over the previous standard largely because it can define a larger range of blocks sizes. For example, the previous standard defines blocks up to 16×16 pixels whereas HEVC/H.265 can define blocks up to 64×64 pixels. Similar to H.264, the new protocol defines a number of profiles (tools) and levels (max bitrates and resolutions).