Zetacast was pleased to support Samsung at the 127th MPEG meeting, held in Gothenburg from 8 to 12 July 2019.

At this meeting MPEG promoted ISO/IEC 23094-1 Essential Video Coding, informally known as MPEG-5 EVC, to the Committee Draft stage of ISO/IEC standardization. The goal of MPEG-5 EVC is to provide a standardized video coding solution to address business needs in use cases, such as video streaming, where existing ISO video coding standards have not been as widely adopted as might be expected from their purely technical characteristics.

The MPEG-5 EVC standards includes a Baseline profile that contains only technologies that are over 20 years old or are otherwise expected to be royalty-free. Additionally, a Main profile adds a small number of additional tools, each providing significant performance gain. All main profile tools are capable of being individually switched off or individually switched over to a corresponding baseline tool. Organizations making proposals for the main profile have agreed to publish applicable licensing terms within two years of FDIS stage, either individually or as part of a patent pool.

A Core Experiment had been set up at the previous meeting to test the performance of three new tools that had been proposed, acting separately and all together.  When used together, these three tools gave about 4.2% decrease in bitrate relative to the ETM 2.0 test model in the random access test configuration for UHD and HD test sequences (Classes A and B). The reduction in bitrate for computer-generated sequences (Class S) was 27.1%, largely due to the action of the Intra Block Copy (IBC) tool which is particularly effective for such content.

The three proposed coding tools appeared to provide a significant reduction in bitrate and to act in a largely orthogonal way.  They were therefore all adopted into the EVC Main profile.  There were also a number of more minor changes adopted into the text that will go forward to the Committee Draft ballot and the new ETM3.0 test model agreed at this meeting.