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was a massive undertaking that dwarfed prior projects in terms of the sheer quantity
of engineering effort devoted to its design and standardization. The result is now
formally standardized as ITU-T Recommendation H.265 and ISO/IEC International
Standard 23008-2 (MPEG-H part 2). The first version of HEVC was completed in
January 2013 (with final approval and formal publication following a few months
later—specifically, ITU-T formal publication was in June, and ISO/IEC formal
publication was in November). While some previous treatments of the HEVC
standard have been published (e.g., [
8
]), this topic provides a more comprehensive
and unified collection of key information about the new standard that will help the
community to understand it well and to make maximal use of its capabilities.
The HEVC project was formally launched in January 2010, when a joint Call
for Proposals (CfP) [
4
,
6
,
10
] was issued by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts
Group (VCEG) and the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). Before
launching the formal CfP, both organizations had conducted investigative work to
determine that it was feasible to create a new standard that would substantially
advance the state of the art in compression capability—relative to the prior major
standard known as H.264/MPEG-4
Advanced Video Coding
(AVC) [
2
,
7
,
9
](the
first version of which was completed in May 2003).
One notable aspect of the investigativeworktowardHEVCwasthe“key
technology area” (KTA) studies in VCEG that began around the end of 2004 and
included the development of publicly-available KTA software codebase for testing
various promising algorithm proposals. In MPEG, several workshops were held, and
a Call for Evidence (CFE) was issued in 2009. When the two groups both reached
the conclusion that substantial progress was possible and that working together on
the topic was feasible, a formal partnership was established and the joint CfP was
issued. The VCEG KTA software and the algorithmic techniques found therein were
used as the basis of many of the proposals submitted in response to both the MPEG
CfE and the joint CfP.
Interest in developing a new standard has been driven not only by the simple
desire to improve compression as much as possible—e.g., to ease the burden
of video on storage systems and global communication networks, but also to
help enable the deployment of new services, including capabilities that have not
previously been practical—such as ultra-high-definition television (UHDTV) and
video with higher-dynamic range, wider color gamut, and greater representation
precision than what is typically found today.
To formalize the partnership arrangement, a new joint organization was created,
called the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC). The JCT-VC met
four times per year after its creation, and each meeting had hundreds of attending
participants and involved the consideration of hundreds of contribution documents
(all of which were made publicly available on the web as they were submitted for
consideration).
The project had an unprecedented scale, with a peak participation reaching about
300 people and more than 1,000 documents at a single meeting. Meeting notes were
publicly released on a daily basis during meetings, and the work continued between
meetings, with active discussions by email on a reflector with a distribution list with
