High Efficiency Video Coding

Effective use of these improvements requires much more signal processing capability for compressing the video but has less impact on the amount of computation needed for decompression.

The ISO/IEC and ITU require companies that belong to their organizations to offer their patents on reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing (RAND) terms.

The licensing fees are one of the main reasons HEVC adoption has been low on the web and is why some of the largest tech companies (Amazon, AMD, Apple, ARM, Cisco, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, Nvidia, and more) have joined the Alliance for Open Media,[8] which finalized royalty-free alternative video coding format AV1 on March 28, 2018.

[20][21] The ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) started a similar project in 2007, tentatively named High-performance Video Coding.

[18][27] Evaluations showed that some proposals could reach the same visual quality as AVC at only half the bit rate in many of the test cases, at the cost of 2–10× increase in computational complexity, and some proposals achieved good subjective quality and bit rate results with lower computational complexity than the reference AVC High profile encodings.

Region 1 countries in the HEVC Advance license include the United States, Canada, European Union, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and others.

[61] On March 31, 2017, Velos Media announced their HEVC license which covers the essential patents from Ericsson, Panasonic, Qualcomm Incorporated, Sharp, and Sony.

[73] On February 11, 2013, researchers from MIT demonstrated the world's first published HEVC ASIC decoder at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) 2013.

[77] A live transcoder that supports HEVC and used in combination with the GPAC video player was shown at the ATEME booth at the NAB Show in April 2013.

[79][80] On August 8, 2013, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone announced the release of their HEVC-1000 SDK software encoder which supports the Main 10 profile, resolutions up to 7680×4320, and frame rates up to 120 fps.

[81] On November 14, 2013, DivX developers released information on HEVC decoding performance using an Intel i7 CPU at 3.5 GHz with 4 cores and 8 threads.

[97][98] On January 22, 2015, Nvidia released the GeForce GTX 960 (GM206), which includes the world's first full fixed function HEVC Main/Main10 hardware decoder in a discrete graphics card.

[99] On February 23, 2015, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) announced that their UVD ASIC to be found in the Carrizo APUs would be the first x86 based CPUs to have a HEVC hardware decoder.

[103] On August 30, 2016, Intel officially announced 7th generation Core CPUs (Kaby Lake) products with full fixed function HEVC Main10 hardware decoding support.

On June 5, 2017, Apple announced HEVC H.265 support in macOS High Sierra, iOS 11, tvOS,[105] HTTP Live Streaming[106] and Safari.

[112] On November 2, 2017, Nvidia released the GeForce GTX 1070 Ti (GP104), which includes full fixed function HEVC Main10/Main12 hardware decoder.

On September 20, 2018, Nvidia released the GeForce RTX 2080 (TU104), which includes full fixed function HEVC Main 4:4:4 12 hardware decoder.

[121] École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) did a study to evaluate the subjective video quality of HEVC at resolutions higher than HDTV.

The five second video sequences showed people on a street, traffic, and a scene from the open source computer animated movie Sintel.

[13] The HEVC standard supports color spaces such as generic film (colour filters using Illuminant C), NTSC, PAL, Rec.

2100, SMPTE 240M, sRGB, sYCC, xvYCC, XYZ, and externally specified color spaces such as Dolby Vision or HDR Vivid.

[141] For instance, the number of context coded bins have been reduced by 8× and the CABAC bypass-mode has been improved in terms of its design to increase throughput.

[13][146] Range extensions in MPEG are additional profiles, levels, and techniques that support needs beyond consumer video playback:[24] Within these new profiles came enhanced coding features, many of which support efficient screen encoding or high-speed processing: HEVC version 2 adds several supplemental enhancement information (SEI) messages: Additional coding tool options have been added in the March 2016 draft of the screen content coding (SCC) extensions:[150] The ITU-T version of the standard that added the SCC extensions (approved in December 2016 and published in March 2017) added support for the hybrid log–gamma (HLG) transfer function and the ICtCp color matrix.

A variety of companies supported the proposal which included Ateme, BBC, BSkyB, Cisco, DirecTV, Ericsson, Motorola Mobility, NGCodec, NHK, RAI, ST, SVT, Thomson Video Networks, Technicolor, and ViXS Systems.

[13][24][155] An objective performance comparison was done in April 2012 in which HEVC reduced the average bit rate for images by 56% compared to JPEG.

[180][181] A draft document has been submitted to the Internet Engineering Task Force which describes a method to add HEVC support to the Real-time Transport Protocol.

[182] Using HEVC's intra frame encoding, a still-image coded format called Better Portable Graphics (BPG) has been proposed by the programmer Fabrice Bellard.

[191][195][196] HEVC Advance made an exception that specifically waives the royalties on software-only implementations (both decoders and encoders) when not bundled with hardware.

It should also support YCbCr 4:4:4, 4:2:2 and 4:2:0 with 10 to 16 bits per component, BT.2100 wide color gamut and high dynamic range (HDR) of more than 16 stops (with peak brightness of 1,000, 4,000 and 10,000 nits), auxiliary channels (for depth, transparency, etc.

JVET issued a final "Call for Proposals" in October 2017, with the first working draft of the Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard released in April 2018.