| EVC / MPEG-5 Part 1 | |
|---|---|
| Essential Video Coding | |
| Status | Draft |
| Year started | 2018 (Initial Requirements Document) |
| Organization | ISO |
| Committee | MPEG |
| Domain | Video compression |
| Website | mpeg |
MPEG-5Essential Video Coding (EVC), standardized as ISO/IEC 23094-1, is avideo compression standard that has been completed in April 2020 by decision of MPEG Working Group 11 at its 130th meeting.[1][2][3][4]
The standard consists of a royalty-free subset and individually switchable enhancements.[2][3][5]
The publicly available requirements document[5] outlines a development process that is defensive against patent threats: Two sets of coding tools,base andenhanced, are defined:
Each of the 21payable tools can have separately acquired and separatelynegotiated and separatelyTradedLicense agreements.[7] Each can be individually turned off and, when necessary, replaced by a correspondingcost free baseline profile tool. This structure makes it easy to fall back to a smaller set of tools in the future, if, for example,licensing complications occur around a specific tool, without breakingcompatibility with already deployed decoders.[7]
This video codec is compatible with hardware accelerators - decoders originally developed for older standards such asAVC/HEVC at least in theBaseline profile.[8]
A proposal bySamsung,Huawei andQualcomm forms the basis of EVC.[9]
MPAI aims to significantly enhance the performance of EVC by improving or replacing traditional tools withAI-based tools, with the goal of reaching at least 25% improvement over the baseline profile of EVC.[14][15][16]
I saw the danger coming and designed a strategy for it. This would create two tracks in MPEG: one track producing royalty free standards (Option 1, in ISO language) and the other the traditional Fair Reasonable and Non Discriminatory (FRAND) standards (Option 2, in ISO language).
EVC uses a novel profile structure. The Baseline profile includes only technologies that are more than 20 years old or that were submitted with a royalty‑free declaration. In contrast, the Main profile adds a small number of additional tools that can be switched off independently—allowing decoders (including hardware accelerators originally developed for older standards such as AVC/HEVC) to continue operating on the Baseline profile.
Though the EVC Main profile uses royalty-bearing "tools," these can be switched on and off with "limited loss of performance." This was the model deployed by Divideon and their xvc codec, and, in theory, it allows those deploying the technology to pick and choose both the performance and the associated royalty cost. (…) Two proposals were submitted in response to MPEG's call for proposals for MPEG-5 Part 1, and MPEG selected the proposal from Samsung, Huawei, and Qualcomm