There is currently the widest breadth of video codecs available for the massive $200B video services industry, comprising broadcast, streaming, and other services, in history: MPEG-2, MPEG-4, AVC, HEVC, VVC, VP8, VP9, AV1, EVC, and LC-EVC. While these codecs compete in the marketplace for share of streams, the consumer surely benefits from having advanced services at lower rates. Is 4K HDR HEVC going to become the new norm for broadcast/streaming? But this is a challenging environment for developers and service provides. In this panel, we explore the breadth of consumer services that are enabled by these technologies, including high resolution: 4K, 8K, and beyond, as well as HDR, and AR/VR – will these finally take off and fulfill their promise? And is 8K the end of the line for consumer devices such as TVs, and even computers, tablets, and smartphones?

We explore the use of separate partitioning structures for luma and chroma channels in the design of next generation video codecs. The proposed methods are evaluated relative to the Quad-Tree, Ternary-Tree and Binary-Tree (QTTTBT) partitioning framework currently implemented in the BenchMark Set (BMS-1.0) software being used in the development of the Versatile Video Coding (VVC) project. VVC is the next generation video compression standard under development by the Joint Video Experts Team (JVET), which is joint collaboration between MPEG and the ITU-T. In the paper, the performance of using shared or separate partitioning tree structures for luma and chroma channels is measured for sequences including those used for the Joint Call for Proposals on video compression with capability beyond HEVC issued by MPEG/ITU-T and trends are analyzed. The use of separate partitioning tree structures is restricted to intra coded regions. Objective performance is reported using the Bjontegaard Delta (BD) bitrate, and visual observations are also provided. To demonstrate the efficacy of using different partition structures, bitrate savings are computed using simulations and show an average improvement of 0.46%(Y)/7.83%(Cb)/7.96%(Cr) relative to state-of-the-art. It is asserted that the coding efficiency improvement is especially pronounced in sequences with occlusions/emergence of objects or dynamic changing content (e.g. fire, water, smoke). In the tests conducted, the Campfire sequence which has a large portion of the picture exhibiting a burning fire, shows the most BD bitrate saving of 1.79%(Y)/5.45%(Cb)/1.82%(Cr).

Tiles is a new feature in the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard that divides a picture into independent, rectangular regions. This division provides a number of advantages. Specifically, it increases the “parallel friendliness” of the new standard by enabling improved coding efficiency for parallel architectures, as compared to previous sliced based methods. Additionally, tiles facilitate improved maximum transmission unit (MTU) size matching, reduced line buffer memory, and additional region-of-interest functionality. In this paper, we introduce the tiles feature and survey the performance of the tool. Coding efficiency is reported for different parallelization factors and MTU size requirements. Additionally, a tile-based region of interest coding method is developed.

In this paper, we introduce the concept of tiles. Tiles are incorporated into the current design of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard being developed by the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC). In the design, tiles are introduced to support high-level parallelism and also to reduce on-chip memory requirements. This paper describes the tile concept and reports results due to the technique.

This paper presents the results of an informal subjective quality comparison between the current state of the emerging High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) draft standard and the well-established H.264 / MPEG-4 AVC High Profile (HP) for low-delay applications. The tests consisted of two basic encoding comparisons. First, we compare the Main profile low-delay configuration of the HEVC reference software (HM) against a similarly configured H.264 / MPEG-4 AVC HP reference encoder (JM). Additionally, to complement these results, the widely-recognized production-quality H.264 / MPEG-4 AVC encoder known as x264 is compared with a production-quality HEVC implementation from eBrisk Video. The encoding configurations are designed to reflect relevant application scenarios and to enable a fair comparison to the maximum extent feasible. When viewing HM and JM encoded video side-by-side in which the JM was configured to use approximately twice the bit rate of the HM encoded video, viewers indicated that they preferred the HM encoded video in approximately 74% of trials. Similarly, when comparing the eBrisk HEVC and x264 H.264 / MPEG-4 AVC production encoders in which x264 was configured to use approximately twice the bit rate of the eBrisk encoded video, viewers indicated they preferred the eBrisk HEVC encoded video in approximately 62% of trials. The selection of which encoding was displayed on which side for the side-by-side viewing was established in a randomized manner, and the subjective viewing experiments were administered in a double-blind fashion. The results reported in this paper generally confirm that the HEVC design (as represented by HM version 7.1 and separately by a production-quality HEVC implementation) exhibits a substantial improvement in compression capability beyond that of H.264 / MPEG-4 AVC (as represented by a similarly-configured JM version 18.3 and x264 version core 122 r2184, respectively) for low-delay video applications, with HEVC exhibiting roughly twice or more of the overall compression capability of H.264 / MPEG-4 AVC.