Zetacast paticipated in the 126th MPEG meeting, which was held in Geneva from 25 to 29 March 2019.

This meeting further developed the new standard known as MPEG-5 Essential Video Coding (EVC). MPEG-5 EVC aims to provide a standardized video coding solution to address business needs in use cases, such as video streaming, where HEVC has not been as widely deployed as might be expected from purely technical considerations. The development of the MPEG-5 EVC standard is expected to be completed in early 2020.  MPEG-5 EVC will include a Baseline profile that contains only technologies that are over 20 years old or are otherwise expected to be royalty-free.  A Main profile will add a small number of additional tools, without these constraints.  Each of these additional tools is individually capable of being either cleanly switched off or else cleanly switched over to the corresponding Baseline tool. With the Main profile tools all turned on, the compression performance of the first test model, ETM 1.0, was measured to be approximately 24% better than HEVC.

ETM 2.0 was agreed at the March meeting, with added high-level syntax and a slightly trimmed design to make it more hardware-friendly.  The average bitrate increase due to this change was 0.16% relative to ETM1.0 in the random access test configuration. A new transform method and its coefficient coding were also proposed:

• Adaptive transform selection (ATS)
• Advanced coefficient coding (ADCC)

The combination of these two tools gave about 4.2% decrease in bitrate relative to ETM 1.0 in the random access test configuration.  These two tools will be further evaluated in Core Experiments that will take place between the March and the July 2019 meeting.