High Efficiency Video Coding
| HEVC / H.265 / MPEG-H Part 2 | |
|---|---|
| High Efficiency Video Coding | |
| Status | In force |
| Year started | 7 June 2013 |
| First published | July 7, 2013 |
| Latest version | 11.0 January 13, 2026 |
| Organization | ITU-T, ISO, IEC |
| Committee | SG16 (VCEG), MPEG |
| Base standards | H.261, H.262, H.263, ISO/IEC 14496-2, H.264 |
| Related standards | H.266, MPEG-5, MPEG-H |
| Predecessor | H.264 |
| Successor | H.266 |
| Domain | Video compression |
| License | MPEG LA |
| Website | www |
High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), also known as H.265 and MPEG-H Part 2, is a proprietary video compression standard designed as part of the MPEG-H project as a successor to the widely used Advanced Video Coding (AVC, H.264, or MPEG-4 Part 10). The standard was published in 2013. In comparison to AVC, HEVC offers from 25% to 50% better data compression at the same level of video quality, or substantially improved video quality at the same bit rate. It supports resolutions up to 8192×4320, including 8K UHD, and unlike the primarily eight-bit AVC, HEVC's higher-fidelity Main 10 profile has been incorporated into nearly all supporting hardware. The High Efficiency Image Format (HEIF) is a container format whose default codec is HEVC.
While AVC uses the integer discrete cosine transform (DCT) with 4×4 and 8×8 block sizes, HEVC uses both integer DCT and discrete sine transform (DST) with varied block sizes between 4×4 and 32×32.