HEVC : how long before it hits the mainstream?

Analysts are beginning to argue about when HEVC will reach the mainstream market. Frost and Sullivan thinks that a critical mass of adopters could take 3 years and that it may be at least 5 years (2018) before consumers see widespread HEVC support in their electronic devices. On the other hand, Ryan Lawler of Techcrunch expects devices with HEVC support to become widely available in around 18 months, with rapid adoption thereafter.

Many chip manufacturers have been closely involved in the standardisation process for HEVC and are already gearing up for production of HEVC-compatible devices. Will the performance gains offered by HEVC be enough to prompt device manufacturers, service providers and users to switch over to the new standard? If so, how quickly will the shift happen? What do you think?

The HEVC standard has been approved

"Geneva, 25 January 2013 – A new video coding standard building on the PrimeTime Emmy award winning ITU-T H.264 / MPEG-4 AVC was agreed by ITU members today".

The ITU-T has announced approval of the new High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard. The new standard will be co-published as Recommendation ITU-T H.265 and ISO/IEC 23008-2.

HEVC is intended to be a successor to the popular H.264 / Advanced Video Coding standard, first published in 2003. As with every video coding standard, the performance of HEVC depends on the way it is put into practice. The developers of the standard, a consortium of ITU-T VCEG and ISO MPEG known as the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding, are expecting HEVC codecs to offer around twice the compression efficiency of H.264/AVC. That means approximately half the bandwidth for the same video quality.

You can download a draft of the HEVC standard and the reference software codec here.

- Iain Richardson

2 billion HEVC devices by 2016?

A market research report by MRG estimates that there will be more than 2 billion HEVC-compatible devices by 2016, with the biggest adoption rates likely to be in the mobile / internet market sectors. You can read the news release here.
HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) is the new standard for video coding, developed by ISO MPEG and ITU-T VCEG.

DASH and HEVC

A couple of useful overview articles:
MPEG DASH : dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP (Jan Ozer)
The HEVC/H.265 wave : what it means for businesses (Randon Morford)

At IBC2012...

I'll be at this year's International Broadcasting Convention in Amsterdam, from 7th-11th September 2012. OneCodec will be sharing the Scottish Development International stand, 9.B26, and we'll be showcasing our new video sharing product, Beamshare. If you're interested in meeting up, let me know. - Iain

Launching Beamshare

The team at OneCodec are almost ready to launch our new product, Beamshare. Beamshare is software for the PC or Mac that lets you share videos privately and directly with people you choose. It works with any video file and you choose who gets to see each video. We're using our unique technology to make sure that every video plays back successfully, no matter what the format. Our launch website is about to go live. If you'd like to sign up as a Beta user, visit the website, register and we'll send you an invite soon. Visit the website: http://beamshare.net

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) : Test model HM3

The Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC), a joint effort of the MPEG and VCEG standardisation committees, is developing a new video coding standard known as High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). HEVC is expected to be published as an International Standard in 2013.

The HEVC "Test Model" is a working prototype that includes the tools or algorithms that are under consideration for the proposed HEVC standard. Version HM3 of the test model (March 2011) defines two groups of tools or "configurations", High Efficiency and Low Complexity.

Both High Efficiency and Low Complexity configurations include the following coding tools:

Coding Unit tree structure (8x8 up to 64x64 luma samples)
Prediction Units
Transform unit tree structure (3 level max.)
Transform block size of 4x4 to 32x32 samples
Mode-dependent Transform for 4x4 block
Spatial Intra Prediction (34 angular directions and Planar)
Adaptive Intra Smoothing
Intra Chroma Prediction using Luma samples
DCT-based interpolation filter for luma samples (1/4-sample, 8-tap)
DCT-based interpolation filter for luma samples (1/8-sample, 4-tap)
Coding Unit based Skip & Prediction Unit based merging
Advanced motion vector prediction
Deblocking filter

The Low Complexity configuration includes Context Adaptive Variable Length Coding (CAVLC).

The High Efficiency configuration uses Context Adaptive Binary Arithmetic Coding (CABAC) and supports increased bit precision for internal operations and an adaptive loop filter.

Download the HM3 Test Model description document.

Keep up to date with the HEVC contributions and documents via the JCT-VC working site:
http://phenix.int-evry.fr/jct/index.php