HEVC Compression Standard

High Efficiency Video Coding is a video encoding standard which is also referred to as H.265 or MPEG-H Part 2. It offers significant bitrate reductions in comparison with AVC (H.264) video encoding format.

HEVC Container Formats

HEVC video content could be stored in various container formats including .MP4 MPEG-4 Part 14 and .MOV (QTFF Quick Time File Format). But you need to check if your favorite software supports HEVC encoded content correctly. Since the format is brand new it can take some time for developers to update their software.

Apple stores single images encoded in HEVC format in files with file extension HEIC and image sequences in files with file extension HEICS.

Why Use HEVC

According to Video Multimethod Assessment Fusion (VMAF) video quality measurement tool, Netflix found that x265 delivered identical quality at bit rates ranging from 35.4% to 53.3% lower than x264, and from 17.8% to 21.8% lower than VP9.

HEIF file format was designed to support storing of HEVC encoded images and image sequences. Since many photo sequences (for example burst photo shoots) consist of many very similar images HEVC is very efficient in compressing them.

HEIF file format also provides a significant reduction in file size in comparison with JPG and PNG files.