HEVC / H.265 Development Tutorial

1. Book and Slides

The book "High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC): Algorithms and Architectures (Integrated Circuits and Systems) " is a good reference in addition to the spec. It covers

(1) High-level syntax of HEVC

(2) Block structures and parallelism

(3) Intra-picture prediction

(4) Inter-picture prediction

(5) Transform and quantization

(6) In-loop filtering 

(7) Entropy coding

(8) Compression performance

(9) Decoder hardware architecture design

(10) Encoder hardware architecture design

Two good tutorial slides 

(1) "Design and Implementa/on of Next Genera/on Video Coding Systems (H.265/HEVC Tutorial)" by Vivienne Sze, et al.

(2) "HEVC/H.265 Video Coding Standard (v. 2), Including Range, Scalable, and Multiview Extensions” by Dan Grois, et al.

2. Spec

ITU-I H.265 High efficiency video coding in ITU website.

3. Reference Software

The reference software for HEVC is called HM (HEVC Test Model). It is maintained in a Subversion repository. Please use a Subversion client to access the repository links directly or use the source browser for web browser access.

• HM software repository (main at HHI)
• HM software repository (mirror at BBC)
• HM software repository (source browser)

4. x265

x265 was shown to be the best overall HEVC encoder in Moscow State University's first HEVC Codec Comparison! x265 was particularly strong in the universal and ripping (high quality) use-cases. The full report is expected to be published on their website,www.compression.ru/video

5. Analysis Tool

Two years ago I compared the available HEVC/H.265 bistream analysis tools.  Currently it seems Intel® Video Pro Analyzer (Intel® VPA) 2016 is the best.