If you need to play high-quality videos compressed with the emerging H.265/VVC codec on your Mac, look no further than Elmedia Player.
Elmedia can play any video file you throw at it | Image: Christian Zibreg/iDB
iOS, macOS and other Apple platforms do not support H.266/VVC, requiring an app like Elmedia Player from Electronic Team (formerly Eltima) to play videos encoded in H.266/VVC on macOS.
The faster your Mac, the better because the decoding complexity of a typical H.266 file is about twice that of H.265. Elmedia Player runs natively on Apple silicon Macs and is one of the fastest media players out there.
Elmedia Player lets you play H.266 videos
This app supports many other foreign video file formats like WMA that cannot be played on macOS out of the box and uses hardware acceleration to decode videos on the GPU instead of the CPU. You get precise video control, full keyboard support, and advanced audio and brightness settings.
If you have H.265 files, Elmedia lets you group them into custom playlists to organize your favorite movies, series, music videos and more.
At September IBC 2023 in Amsterdam, the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications used Elmedia Player to demonstrate the H.266/VVC codec.
How to watch an H.266 video in Elmedia Player for Mac
The interface disappears when watching the video | Image: Christian Zibreg/iDB
Elmedia Player is $20 on the App Store, but you can download the free version from the official website. If you like the app, you can upgrade to the full version to get streaming support, picture-in-picture mode and other advanced features.
Elmedia Player is also available on Setapp, a monthly subscription from Ukrainian developer MacPaw that gives you access to dozens of quality macOS and iOS apps for $10/month.
With the app installed, open or drop a H.266/VCC encoded video file to the main window of the app and enjoy the high visual quality and improved compression efficiency that H.266 offers.
What is H.266/VVC?
Streaming support requires a paid version | Image: Christian Zibreg/iDB
H.266, also known as Versatile Video Coding (VVC), is a next-generation compression standard developed by the Joint Video Experts Team. It’s meant to replace the previous H.265 standard, also known as High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), that Apple supports across its platform in both hardware and software.
Compared with H.265/HEVC, the latest H.266/VVC standard offers 50 percent better compression for the same quality as before, resulting in roughly half the file size. ]
By default, your iPhone compresses all videos and photos you take using the H.264 codec, which offers reduced file size for the same perceptual quality compared to JPG. Even though the new H.266/VVC compression was finalized in 2020, it’s currently not widely supported by mobile and desktop platforms.
Like H.265 before it, H.266 has the right features that Apple needs, including resolutions up to 16K, 360-degree videos, a wide color gamut and high dynamic range of more than 16 stops, panoramic formats, auxiliary channels for data like depth or transparency, spatial resolution