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A Future Without MPEG

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Re: A Future Without MPEG

#11

Post by zerocrates »

ksec wrote: post #8
zerocrates wrote: post #3

I don't really understand what the point of EVC is. From my understanding it's really two standards, one royalty-free that's slightly worse than HEVC/H.265, and one patent-encumbered/licensed that's slightly better than H.265. The post here says "EVC is promising because it provides a quality that is comparable with or better than AV1, although less than VVC. EVC may have a chance if a licence will be published. Howe…

The widely deployed AVC is still AVC Main Profile, which is what Youtube and many other Streaming / Broadcasting uses due to devices compatibility. EVC Baseline is expected ( or claims ) to be 20% better than AVC High Profile . So you should expect ~30% better than current AVC all while being royalty free. The beauty of EVC baseline is that it is quite power efficient. Considering AVC already require the least comput…

My understanding is that YouTube uses at least some High Profile, and only Main for the lowest resolutions (though who knows how up to date that information is), along with of course VP9 and AV1 where they figure they can.

Anyway, if those claims bear out then it would seem like EVC has a possible future as an "AVC killer," though the computation complexity factors are complicated by the wide deployment of hardware acceleration for AVC encode/decode. Of course, hardware support could materialize for EVC as well, but it does rather complicate possible adoption for what we'll call a "sub-generational" improvement, in a world coming around right about now to AV1 hardware support.

Perhaps reduced computational demands could lead to a niche of usage in unaccelerated environments. I don't know if there's an example of significant uptake for an "in-between" step like this that one could point to as a possible model for success, though.

Re: A Future Without MPEG

#12

Post by ksec »

I am not sure where to begin. But let's start with EVC.

EVC Baseline is expected to be 20% better than AVC High Profile, and EVC Main Profile is expected to be 30% better than HEVC. The Codec is backed by Huawei, Samsung and Qualcomm. If you are unfamiliar with the Smartphone market, The three would represent roughly 80% of marketshare excluding Apple.

Now on to VVC. I am surprised by the sentence

MC-IF has 31 members, 7 of which are licensing entities (i.e. a little less than ¼ of all members). The “industry” members account for just ½ of the HEVC patent holders. It is hardly believable that VVC will fare better than HEVC. It could very well fare worse because VVC adoption in broadcasting will take years.

Well Yes. That is because 7 of those licensing entities already covered most if not all of the industry. ( Excluding a few Open Media Alliance Member of course ) The MC-IF actually includes ALL of the current HEVC patents holders. That is HEVC Advance and Velos Media, which is basically Samsung and Qualcomm, along with many others that were not in any HEVC patent pool due to disagreement in the first place.

( And If you notice the removal of the infamous Technicolor, they sold their patents to another entity that is inside MC-IF, but I cant remember which one on top of my head )

VVC is expected to be 50% more efficient than HEVC. And judging from its reference encoder, this is the first time since AVC / H.264 era a video codec that might actually live up to its claims. ( Normally marketing likes to use unrealistic claims ) It really is the state of the art Video Codec, at a decoding complexity that is quite manageable. ( Lower than AV1 )

So what does all that means? Samsung, Huawei and Qualcomm are also inside MC-IF ( represented by different groups ). My guess is that EVC is basically a backup plan or a gesture to MC-IF, if the licensing deal can be agreed upon, they will go with EVC.

As a video codec enthusiast, I am extremely excited with both VVC and EVC.

As to MPEG ( Not to be confused with MPEG-LA ), I am not quite sure why he said it is dead. I reread the article a few times and still dont quite understand it. May be I am missing some context?

Re: A Future Without MPEG

#13

Post by ksec »

zerocrates wrote: post #11
ksec wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The widely deployed AVC is still AVC Main Profile, which is what Youtube and many other Streaming / Broadcasting uses due to devices compatibility. EVC Baseline is expected ( or claims ) to be 20% better than AVC High Profile . So you should expect ~30% better than current AVC all while being royalty free. The beauty of EVC baseline is that it is quite power efficient. Considering AVC already require the least comput…

My understanding is that YouTube uses at least some High Profile, and only Main for the lowest resolutions (though who knows how up to date that information is), along with of course VP9 and AV1 where they figure they can. Anyway, if those claims bear out then it would seem like EVC has a possible future as an "AVC killer," though the computation complexity factors are complicated by the wide deployment of hardware a…

>My understanding is that YouTube uses at least some High Profile

Oh yes. I just double checked. I stand corrected. I was under the impression they only use high profile with MutiView Videos.

Re: A Future Without MPEG

#14

Post by sitkack »

This is absolutely amazing, I had no idea this would come so soon. I wonder how much the vp% series of codecs played a part, or netflix/amazon/youtube controlling both ends of the channel?

The next device to get converted to the web is the smart tv, there is no reason it literally has be anything different then a webpage, same goes for Roku.

Re: A Future Without MPEG

#16

Post by drmpeg »

zerocrates wrote: post #11
ksec wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The widely deployed AVC is still AVC Main Profile, which is what Youtube and many other Streaming / Broadcasting uses due to devices compatibility. EVC Baseline is expected ( or claims ) to be 20% better than AVC High Profile . So you should expect ~30% better than current AVC all while being royalty free. The beauty of EVC baseline is that it is quite power efficient. Considering AVC already require the least comput…

My understanding is that YouTube uses at least some High Profile, and only Main for the lowest resolutions (though who knows how up to date that information is), along with of course VP9 and AV1 where they figure they can. Anyway, if those claims bear out then it would seem like EVC has a possible future as an "AVC killer," though the computation complexity factors are complicated by the wide deployment of hardware a…

A quick check shows 360p = Baseline, 720p = Main, 1080p = High.

Re: A Future Without MPEG

#17

Post by unlord »

ksec wrote: post #12

I am not sure where to begin. But let's start with EVC. EVC Baseline is expected to be 20% better than AVC High Profile , and EVC Main Profile is expected to be 30% better than HEVC. The Codec is backed by Huawei, Samsung and Qualcomm. If you are unfamiliar with the Smartphone market, The three would represent roughly 80% of marketshare excluding Apple. Now on to VVC. I am surprised by the sentence MC-IF has 31 membe…

> It really is the state of the art Video Codec, at a decoding complexity that is quite manageable. ( Lower than AV1 )

I am afraid this has not been substantiated by any of the public decoder demonstrations I've seen. Please see the most recent VVC technical update presented at the MC-IF meeting on March 2nd of this year:

https://a7dce6fd-e8f0-45f7-b0b0-255c5c9a28e1.filesusr.com/ug...

On slide 10 is a graph of VVC performance showing the VTM (VVC) decoder at 2.0x the complexity of HM (HEVC). On slide 12, the Ittiam production decoder boasts 1920x1080 @ 24fps on a 4-core Cortex A75 @ 2.5GHz.

Compare that with this recent study of dav1d (AV1) decoder complexity on a broad set of mobile SOCs, where 1920x1080 @ 24fps was easily reached by a Google Pixel 1 from 2016! Using just the two LITTLE cores! Even higher frame rates were achieved with more modern devices:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AV1/comments/gncplq/av1_multithread...

Full disclosure, I contribute to the dav1d project and performed this study.

Re: A Future Without MPEG

#18

Post by dwheeler »

Put another way: The video patent cartels have fragmented due to greed, and so the cartel enablers at ISO have lost their purpose. In addition, organizations are tired of paying bridge tolls.

So we can finally have open standards for video that anyone can just use and implement. AV1 in particular seems to be on its way to replacing them: https://research.mozilla.org/av1-media-codecs/

Re: A Future Without MPEG

#19

Post by amelius »

dwheeler wrote: post #18

Put another way: The video patent cartels have fragmented due to greed, and so the cartel enablers at ISO have lost their purpose. In addition, organizations are tired of paying bridge tolls. So we can finally have open standards for video that anyone can just use and implement. AV1 in particular seems to be on its way to replacing them: https://research.mozilla.org/av1-media-codecs/

I guess a problem is that most hardware, SoCs etc, still use MPEG.

Re: A Future Without MPEG

#20

Post by cure »

If it is true, then good bloody riddance. Nobody is going to miss those rent seekers. The future belongs to open, unencumbered standards.
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