Last update: 2011/08/21
What comes after MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 is more video compression.
Two years after the completion of the 1st edition of the AVC standard MPEG organised a Worshop on Future Directions in Video Compression (Busan, 2005). The purpose of the workshop was to inquire about the prospects of a new generation of video compression standards. As no definite answer could not be obtained another Workshop was held 6 months later (Nice, 2005) with similar result. Three years later two workshops in a row on New Challenges in Video Coding Standardization (Hannover and Busan, 2008) brought announcements of new, but still uudocumented, algorithms providing more than 30% compression. That was enough to trigger MPEG into issuing a Call for Evidence for new video coding technology. This was done at the Maui, HI meeting in April 2009. Submissions were reviewed at the following meeting (London, July 2009) and seeing the promising results, a draft CfP for High Efficiency Video Coding (HVC) was produced.
In the mean time the work done by the JVT at meetings was more and more reduced and the JVT was closed at the Lausanne meeting in February 2009. Three weeks later I went to Geneva to meet the ITU-T Director to discuss the opening of a new collaborative team termed (rather redundantly) Joint Collaborative Team (JCT). The object of the collaboration was a new video coding standard called High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). Unlike the JVT which could meet independently of MPEG and VCEG, MPEG should either meet with the JCT part of it or MPEG should meet at least in the same city when the JCT meets under the auspices of the ITU-T.
The HEVC Call for Proposals was developed while the discussions on requirements were progressing. These were reviewed jointly with VCEG and the two organisations issued a Joint Call for Proposals on Video Compression Technology at the Kyoto meeting in January 2010.
The Forces of Nature had remained quiet for too long. The very day the JCT held its first meeting session in Dresden (April 2010) the volcanic eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland started causing enormous disruption to air travel across western and northern Europe and henceforth to all the world. JCT experts were already in place but many other MPEG experts were physically prevented from attending. Teleconference and skype were widely used to get the involvement of other experts in the meetings.
In Dresden a reduced number of top-performing proposals were screened from the test. The work is currently progressing fast, also thanks to the large number of organisations actively contributing to the work.
