HEIF/HEVC 2 NEW CAMERA FEATURES IN IOS 11 TO SAVE STORAGE

In WWDC 2017 apple announced ios 11 with many new features. They also talked about HEIF/HEVC formats and how they are going to save you storage upto 50%. In these formats , users wont see any image quality difference and this will help for those who have 16GB or 32GB variant devices.

From last few years apple was using x264 video encoding which is now pretty old and consumes a lot of storage and photos were in JPEG format. As they improves camera in every update and in turn also increases their storage requirement. Keeping in mind about this thing , are adding these new features.

As you know none of these features are developed by apple . They are using it for better compression . HEVC format was released in 2015 and in high demand nowadays , same with HEIF. Apple is the first one to add these codec as an inbuilt feature in their phones. Through this they can continue to improve their photos and video quality which they are trying to do in iOS 11 update.

By making use of High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) and High Efficiency Image File Format (HEIF) apple is getting ready for their future updates.

WHAT THIS FEATURE WILL DO?

Basically , you will save almost 50% of storage and data too ( live streaming).

If you’re running iOS 11 beta 1, you can see this by switching between the High Efficiency and Most Compatible formats under iOS Settings → Camera → Formats. If you are using High Efficiency format, images will be saved as HEIC and movies as a HEVC .mov file. But Under Most Compatible, images will be saved as JPGs and movies as an h.264 .mov file. If you verify their sizes , you will see a big difference.

I just recorded a video in h.264 format of 12MB and same with h.265 format of 6.8MB , whereas same for photos like i clicked a photo of 2MB in most compatible mode where as in HEIF it was only 1.2MB . It is saving almost 50% of the storage.

Apart from this , apple has already started working on HEIF/HEVC features in iPhone 6. Apps are optimized like facetime which will now use HEVC to save bandwidth and data. Which means cleaner and clearer videos with low data consumption . In WWDC 2017 they showed how deblocking filter works and will improve image appearance.

This is only the beginning of new things which they said about in WWDC . More new features are about to come. This is only a developer preview built and we will see many new features which are still unknown in coming updates for sure.