2020: Crunch time for codecs

The industry can kiss goodbye to the familiar pattern of one dominant video codec per decade. As we move into 2020 there are a raft of developments giving media streamers, device manufacturers and chipset vendors a multitude of options to trade operational performance with price.

Key developments include two new standards, MPEG-5 EVC and MPEG LCEVC, reaching final draft in April and full standardisation by October this year.

VVC, another MPEG standard, is also on course for standardisation by year end.

Meanwhile, AV1, which is being promoted as an alternative to MPEG schemes, is having to battle a patent pool challenge for AV1 implementation - contrary to a key reason for setting AV1 up in the first place which was to be royalty free.

Let’s unpick each of these in turn.

Essential Video Coding – licence friendly baseline

EVC is intended to be an alternative to coding standards such as HEVC, AV1 or VVC and expressly designed to be royalty free in its basic implementation. It was initiated by MPEG as…