STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN: The Moving Picture Experts Group issued a draft international standard of a new video-compression format, H.265, said to be twice as efficient as the current H.264/AVC standard.
The multi-industry body met last month to draft a standard for High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) that would enable faster delivery of current quality video using less bandwidth or greater video quality using the same bandwidth as H.264 today.
“There's a lot of industry interest in this because it means you can halve the bit rate and still achieve the same visual quality, or double the number of television channels with the same bandwidth, which will have an enormous impact on the industry,” stated Per Fröjdh, Ericsson Research visual technology manager and chairman of the Swedish MPEG delegation.
The format is expected to be ready for use as early as next year, and by 2015 it could account for 90 percent of all network traffic, the group said. The new format would clear the way for service providers to launch more video services with the currently available spectrum.
Another area where the MPEG Visual Technology team is working on was said to be “a new kind of 3D video compression format, which would enable a new standard for 3D video systems that would do away with 3D glasses.”
That system could be standardized by 2014, the group said. “Future 3D technology will have more advanced displays, which will enable different views,” stated Fröjdh. “The simpler versions of this technology will still just offer the two views we have today – left and right – without the need for glasses. But in the future, there will be many views next to each other, so you will simply move your head to the left or the right to give you a stereo impression of an object.” ~ by Greg Tarr of TWICE
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