Next-gen video codec hits milestone
Rick Merritt, EE Times -- EDN, February 9, 2012
SAN JOSE—The standards group hammering out the next generation of the MPEG media codec has forged a committee draft of the HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) standard in a regular meeting here this week. The spec also known informally as H.265 is expected to provide efficiency boosts in transmitting video for next generation systems and networks using it.
The committee draft is seen is an important but not a final milestone in the standard's progress. The spec faces two more hurdles before it is cast in stone.
Attendees at the standards event here had mixed opinions about whether or not the standard was now stable enough to start design work. Some companies claim they are already starting chip designs for HEVC, others say they will wait about six months for the standard to progress to the next and more stable milestone, the draft international standard expected in July.
The group aims to ratify a final standard in January 2013.
When it was initially proposed, advocates said H.265 could provide efficiency boosts of 35-40 percent over today's H.264 codecs. In this week's meeting one speaker said the boosts could be as high as 67 percent.
HEVC is the follow on to H.264, also known as MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding. The new spec is being drafted by the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding, a collaboration between the MPEG group and the ITU-T.
This story was originally posted by EE Times.
