HEVC/H.265 Hits Committee Draft Milestone

The outcome of 8th HEVC meeting (San-Jose) in the last week was the committee draft of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC or H.265) standard. HEVC will further reduce by 50% the data rate needed for high quality video coding, as compared to H.264 or MPEG4 AVC.

According to a report from EE time, the committee draft is seen is an important but not a final milestone in the standard’s progress. The spec faces two more hurdles before it is cast in stone. Attendees at the standards event here had mixed opinions about whether or not the standard was now stable enough to start design work. Some companies claim they are already starting chip designs for HEVC, others say they will wait about six months for the standard to progress to the next and more stable milestone, the draft international standard expected in July. The group aims to ratify a final standard in January 2013.

The 8th HEVC meeting notes can be downloaded in wftp3.itu.int website. Perhaps HEVC Test Model (HM) Reference Software 6.0 will be the Committee Draft reference codes. The current HEVC Test Model version is the HM-5.2rc1.