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In-Depth Information
thousands of members, and with formal coordination between meetings in the form
of work by “ad hoc groups” to address particular topics and “core experiments”
to test various proposals. Essentially the entire community of relevant companies,
universities, and other research institutions was attending and actively participating
as the standard was developed.
There had been two previous occasions when the ITU's VCEG and ISO/IEC's
MPEG groups had formed similar partnerships. One was AVC, about a decade
earlier, and the other was what became known as MPEG-2 (which was Recom-
mendation H.262 in the ITU naming convention), about a decade before that.
Each of these had been major milestones in video coding history. About a
decade before those was when the standardization of digital video began, with the
creation of the ITU's Recommendation 601 in 1982 for uncompressed digital video
representation and its Recommendation H.120 in 1984 as the first standard digital
video compression technology—although it would not be until the second version of
Recommendation H.261 was established in 1990 that a really adequate compression
design would emerge (and in several ways, even the HEVC standard owes its basic
design principles to the scheme found in H.261).
1.2
Compression Capability: The Fundamental Need
Uncompressed video signals generate a huge quantity of data, and video use has
become more and more ubiquitous. There is also a constant hunger for higher
quality video—e.g., in the form of higher resolutions, higher frame rates, and
higher fidelity—as well as a hunger for greater access to video content. Moreover,
the creation of video content has moved from the being the exclusive domain
of professional studios toward individual authorship, real-time video chat, remote
home surveillance, and even “always on” wearable cameras. As a result, video traffic
is the biggest load on communication networks and data storage world-wide—a
situation that is unlikely to fundamentally change; although anything that can help
ease the burden is an important development. HEVC offers a major step forward in
that regard [
5
].
Today, AVC is the dominant video coding technology used world-wide. As a
rough estimate, about half the bits sent on communication networks world-wide
are for coded video using AVC, and the percentage is still growing. However, the
emerging use of HEVC is likely to be the inflection point that will soon cause that
growth to cease as the next generation rises toward dominance.
MPEG-2 basically created the world of digital video television as we know it,
so while AVC was being developed, some people doubted that it could achieve
a similar degree of ubiquity when so much infrastructure had been built around
the use of MPEG-2. Although it was acknowledged that AVC might have better
compression capability, some thought that the entrenched universality of MPEG-2
might not allow a new non-compatible coding format to achieve “critical mass”.
