HEVC- High Efficiency Video Coding

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Complete Guide to the Latest Standard in Video Compression

HEVC, High Efficiency Video Coding, is the new and third standard for video compression that has the potential to deliver better performance than earlier standards such as H.264/AVC. The main benefit and hopes for the the new codec are 50% better compression efficiency than H.264 and support for resolutions up to 8192×4320. Encoding.com created this guide to walk you through the new standard and give you a run down of the ins-and-outs of the protocol.

History of HEVC

The HEVC standard came out of a project to standardize video coding by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (ITU-T Q.6/SG 16) and ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 11). The Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC) was established to work on this project. The Joint Collaborative Team on 3D Video Coding Extension Development (JCT-3V) was also established to work on 3D video coding extensions of HEVC and other video coding standards.

The ITU-T began development of a successor to H.264 in 2004, while ISO/IEC began working in 2007. In January 2010, the groups collaborated on a joint Call for Proposals, which culminated in a meeting of the MPEG & VCEG Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC) in April 2010, at which the name High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) was adopted for the codec. In October, 2010, the JCT-VC produced the first working draft specification, with the Draft Standard — based upon the eight working draft specifications — approved in July, 2012. In January of this year the ITU announced that HEVC had received first stage approval (consent) in the ITU-T Alternative Approval Process, while MPEG announced that HEVC had been promoted to Final Draft International Standard (FDIS) status in the MPEG standardization process. In April 13, 2013: HEVC/H.265 approved as an ITU-T standard, and it’s now available for download on the ITU-T site.

How Does it Work?

Source video, consisting of video frames, is encoded or compressed by an HEVC video encoder to create a compressed video bitstream. Each individual frame is first broken up into blocks of pixels. The blocks are then analyzed for spatial redundancies and temporal linkages between frames are analyzed to take advantage of areas that do not change. These are encoded via motion vectors that predict qualities of the given block on the next frame. The residual information is encoded using an efficient binary compression. read more...