MPEG-5 Essential Video Coding (EVC), standardized as ISO/IEC 23094-1, is a video compression standard that has been completed in April 2020 by decision of MPEG Working Group 11 at its 130th meeting.[1][2][3][4]
The standard consists of a royalty-free subset and individually switchable enhancements.[2][3][5]
Concept
The publicly available requirements document[5] outlines a development process that is defensive against patent threats: Two sets of coding tools, base and enhanced, are defined:
The base consist of tools that were made public more than 20 years ago or for which a Type 1 declaration is received. Type 1, or option 1, means "royalty-free", in the nomenclature used in ISO documents.[6]
The "enhanced" set consists of 21[7] other tools which have passed an extra compression efficiency justification and which can be disabled individually.
Each of the 21 payable tools can have separately acquired and separately negotiated and separately TradedLicense agreements.[7] Each can be individually turned off and, when necessary, replaced by a corresponding cost free baseline profile tool. This structure makes it easy to fall back to a smaller set of tools in the future, if, for example, licensing complications occur around a specific tool, without breaking compatibility with already deployed decoders.[7]
This video codec is compatible with hardware accelerators - decoders originally developed for older standards such as AVC/HEVC at least in the Baseline profile.[8] This is significant difference to AV1 or H.266 that do not have this functionality and are designed to achieve higher compression gains even in higher cost of processing/computational power.
XEVE (eXtra-fast Essential Video Encoder)[10] is self-described as a fast open source EVC encoder. It is written in C99 and supports both the baseline and main profiles of EVC. Its license is a custom 3-clause BSD license.
FFmpeg version 7.1[11][12] officially supports encoding and decoding using official external library above (for encoding) and decoder library: eXtra-fast Essential Video Decoder (XEVD).[13]
MPAI-EVC
MPAI aims to significantly enhance the performance of EVC by improving or replacing traditional tools with AI-based tools, with the goal of reaching at least 25% improvement over the baseline profile of EVC.[14][15][16]
^Chiariglione, Leonardo (28 January 2018). "A crisis, the causes and a solution". Retrieved 6 April 2019. I saw the danger coming and designed a strategy for it. This would create two tracks in MPEG: one track producing royalty free standards (Option 1, in ISO language) and the other the traditional Fair Reasonable and Non Discriminatory (FRAND) standards (Option 2, in ISO language).
^McCann, Ken. "MPEG-5 Essential Video Coding (EVC)"(PDF). itu.int/en/ITU-T/Workshops-and-Seminars/20191008/Documents. EVC uses a novel profile structure. The Baseline profile includes only technologies that are more than 20 years old or that were submitted with a royalty‑free declaration. In contrast, the Main profile adds a small number of additional tools that can be switched off independently—allowing decoders (including hardware accelerators originally developed for older standards such as AVC/HEVC) to continue operating on the Baseline profile.{{cite web}}: More than one of |author1= and |last1= specified (help)
^Ozer, Jan (October 15, 2019). "Inside MPEG's Ambitious Plan to Launch 3 Video Codecs in 2020". Retrieved June 12, 2020. Though the EVC Main profile uses royalty-bearing "tools," these can be switched on and off with "limited loss of performance." This was the model deployed by Divideon and their xvc codec, and, in theory, it allows those deploying the technology to pick and choose both the performance and the associated royalty cost. (…) Two proposals were submitted in response to MPEG's call for proposals for MPEG-5 Part 1, and MPEG selected the proposal from Samsung, Huawei, and Qualcomm
