High Efficiency Video Coding / HEVC / H.265 : Beyond H.264
May 2010
Work is continuing on the new video coding standard, currently known as "High Efficiency Video Coding" (HEVC). A Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC) has been set up by ISO/IEC MPEG and ITU-T VCEG. Following a Call for Proposals in January, 27 proposals were submitted to the first meeting of the JCT-VC in April. Elements of some of these proposals have been combined to develop an initial Test Model, a starting point for development of the new standard. The initial Test Model has similarities to earlier standards such as H.264/AVC, including block-based intra/inter prediction, block transform and entropy coding. New features include increased prediction flexibility, more sophisticated interpolation filters, a wider range of block sizes and new entropy coding schemes. Coding performance varies across the different proposals. It looks like we might expect to see a 2x compression improvement compared with H.264/AVC (i.e. half the bitrate at the same visual quality), at the expense of a significant increase in computational complexity (perhaps 3x or more). You can find the technical proposals here.
November 2009
H.264 Advanced Video Compression (also known as MPEG-4 Part 10) is widely accepted as a leading video compression standard. Other formats such as VC-1 and AVS can (arguably) offer similar performance but H.264 is definitely a front runner in terms of coding efficiency. First standardized in 2003, H.264/AVC is now a mature technology. So what is next ?
The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) are examining the need for a new video compression standard. At a recent MPEG meeting (June 2009), several proposals for improved video compression were presented. The consensus was that (a) there is likely to be a need for a new compression format, as consumers demand higher-quality video and as processing capacity improves and (b) there is potential to deliver better performance than the current state-of-the art.
The current plan is to set up a Joint Collaborative Team (JCT) of MPEG and VCEG representatives to work on a new video coding standard. It will aim to deliver significantly better compression performance than H.264/AVC, probably at a higher computational cost. Its working title ? Several proposals are on the cards but the most popular seems to be High Efficiency Video Coding (HVC).
MPEG's current timetable for developing HVC is as follows:
| January 2010 |
Call for Proposals issued |
| Feb-April 2010 |
Technology proposals submitted and evaluated |
| Late 2010 |
Test Model reference codec developed |
| 2011-2012 |
Draft versions of the new standard |
| 2012/2013? |
New video coding standard published. |
As the technology develops, I will be posting tutorials here on the new emerging standard.
What is H.264?
A non-technical overview of H.264
More video coding resources
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