New Video Compression Standard Doubles Efficiency

Ericsson discusses the recent meeting of the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), which issued a draft international standard of the new High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) video-compression format. It’s twice as efficient as current standards. Twice as efficient means half the bits, which means half the spectrum capacity is required for the same video quality.

A few years ago Motorola issue a white paper on video and LTE networks that contained a number of interesting views, and which observed, “History has shown that technological evolution typically results in ~10% – 20% annual improvement in encoder efficiency, with the efficiency doubling every 6 – 8 years as a result of technological breakthroughs.”

It’s a way to tackle network capacity issues, wired and wireless, from the other end. Reduce the number of bits needed to represent the same thing. Ericsson thinks the HEVC standard could appear in mobile use cases next year.

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