The state of H.266/VVC in 2026

Every couple of years, a new video codec makes an introduction to the world and years after that, when enough momentum is reached, new codecs are the preferred way of distributing video over the internet. Now, if we take a look at how things are progressing we are seeing that VVC is not really taking off so much. If we have to put things into perspective:

• No mainstream streaming platform uses VVC at the moment of writing.
• Android 17 supports VVC encoding/decoding, but only if the SoC supports it.
  Currently, no smartphone SoCs support this functionality. So that means no practical use case here.
• Although specialised builds for FFmpeg might include support, the default FFmpeg packages for most Linux distributions do not come with libvvenc bundled. The brew distribution on macOS also comes without VVC included in the build.
• No consumer GPU vendor ships VVC hardware encode/decode. It's all done in software: this means hot devices, laptops with spinning fans while watching a movie. Just not so practical for consumers. Sidenote: Intel does include a hardware decoder, but only for their premium "Ultra" processor line-up.
• We are currently 6 years into the release of H.266/VVC. It is not usual for market adaptation to be this slow.

What's most interesting is how far we have come as far as video encoding has come. The goal of new video codecs has always been to make it possible for video to be stored and transferred at reduced bitrates, while still keeping the same quality. A 4K Dolby Vision movie encoded in H.265 still fits perfectly fine on a blu-ray disc and is visually perfect. And because consumer demand for higher resolutions than 4K has dropped massively because of the lack of TVs and media playback hardware that support 8K, there is no real need for H.266 unfortunately. Not in the professional world, and not in the consumer world.

Another big reason: browser support

During the era of the so-called "video codec wars" (2007-2010) H.264 was the clear winner. Even today, this codec still plays a big role thanks to great hardware support, great software encoding speed and the larger bandwidth requirements which is a negligible thing nowadays thanks to blazing fast 5G mobile internet.

Ogg Theora popped up as a real contender - a royalty-free video codec supported mainly by Firefox and Opera, while Chrome and Safari never adopted it at all. The codec faced two big disadvantages:

• It was technically inferior to H.264 - compression efficiency was noticeably worse.
• It never got hardware decode support, so it was always software-based decoding.

These days, the switch is the other way around. Since the creation of the Alliance for Open Media in 2015 there has been a major shift into what big technology companies prefer now: patent-free open-source codecs widely supported on as much platforms and browsers as possible. This, combined with the decreased need of bandwidth-efficient video thanks to high-speed internet access, makes it so that the industry is clearly settling on what we have created so far, because a 10% to 25% increase in efficiency for a VVC encoded video compared to AV1 is simply not worth it. Especially when a modern AMD laptop CPU can software-encode an AV1 file at more than 60 frames per second, while the reference VVC software encoder only tops out at 3 frames per second. That's 20 times slower, folks!

The verdict

VVC technically is the winner in terms of a general-purpose video codec. It beats AV1 in compression efficiency and it beats HEVC by an even wider margin. However, compression efficiency was never the only statistic to win a codec war. These days, that exact efficiency number is not so important. What is important though is if decoding and encoding is available to consumers and professionals at great efficiency thanks to hardware support. This exact "support" is lacking in the H.266/VVC space, so encoding is incredible slow and decoding makes the CPU of your playback device work its muscles.

As told before: back in the days, H.264 was the clear winner over Ogg Theora video. Today, times are different: open source codecs like VP9 and AV1 are winning big time as margins in efficiency are shrinking. Encode times and efficient decodes have replaced bitrate requirements.