Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
Patent pools and standardization do not offer perfect answers to the sticky
problems surrounding the establishment of known and reasonable costs for
implementing modern digital video technology. In fact, a number of substantial
disputes have arisen in relation to the previous major standards for video coding,
and such disputes may occur for HEVC as well. However, proposed proprietary
alternatives—including those asserted to be “open source” or “royalty free”—
are not necessarily an improvement over that situation, as they bring with them
their own legal ambiguity. For example, since those proprietary technologies are
not generally standardized, such designs may carry no assurances of licensing
availability or of licenses having “reasonable and non-discriminatory” terms.
It is likely to take some time for the industry to sort out the patent situation for
HEVC, as has been the case for other designs. There is little clear alternative to that,
since the only designs that are clearly likely to be free of patent rights are those
that were developed so long ago that all the associated patents have expired—and
such schemes generally may not have adequate technical capability. In regard to the
previous major international standards, the industry has ultimately sorted out the
business terms so that the technology could be widely used by all with reasonable
costs and a manageable level of business risk—and we certainly hope that this will
also be the case for HEVC.
1.7
Overview of This Topic
This topic collects together the key information about the design of the new
HEVC standard, its capabilities, and its emerging use in deployed systems. It has
been written by key experts on the subject—people who were directly and deeply
involved in developing and writing the standard itself and its associated software
and conformance testing suite or are well-known pioneering authorities on HEVC
hardware implementation architecture. We hope that this material will help the
industry and the community at large to learn how to take full advantage of the
promise shown by the new design to facilitate its widespread use.
Chapter
2
by Sjöberg and Boyce describes the high-level syntax of HEVC, which
provides a robust, flexible and extensible framework for carrying the coded video
and associated information to enable the video content to be used in the most
effective possible ways and in many different application environments.
Chapter
3
by Schwarz, Schierl, and Marpe covers the block structures and
parallelism features of HEVC, which establish the fundamental structure of its
coding design.
Chapter
4
by Lainema and Han describes the intra-picture prediction design in
HEVC, which has made it a substantial advance over prior technologies even for
still-picture coding.
Chapter
5
by Bross et al. describes inter-picture prediction, which is the heart
of what distinguishes a video coding design from other compression applications.
Efficient inter-picture prediction is crucial to what makes HEVC powerful and
flexible.
