MPEG-5 EVC(Essential Video Coding)는 2020년 4월 ISO/IEC MPEG(Moving Picture Experts Group)에서 최종 결정된 최신 동영상 코딩 표준입니다.

MPEG는 2019년 1월 EVC 표준화 작업을 시작하여 Baseline과 Main 두 개의 프로파일을 지원하도록 설계했습니다. Baseline 프로파일은 Royalty-Free로 선언된 또는 20년 전 이미 개발된 기술들로 설계하였으며, Main 프로파일은 Baseline 프로파일 위에 압축 효율 향상을 위한 최소한의 툴을 추가하여 설계하였습니다. MPEG에서 수행한 화질 평가에 따르면, 동일 화질에서 Baseline 프로파일의 압축률은 AVC/H.264 대비 40%, Main 프로파일은 HEVC/H.265 대비 40% 향상된 것으로 나타났습니다.

2021년 6월 Samsung Research는 동영상 스트리밍, OTT 서비스 등에 바로 적용할 수 있는 상용 수준의 EVC 인코더(XEVE: the eXtra-fast Essential Video Encoder)와 디코더(XEVD: the eXtra-fast Essential Video Decoder) 오픈소스 프로젝트를 런칭했습니다. 그리고 2022년 7월에는 모바일 디바이스를 지원하는 새로운 Feature를 공개했습니다. 안드로이드 기기(갤럭시 S22 Ultra)에서 EVC 코덱을 이용한 실시간 데모를 통해 향상된 성능을 확인할 수 있습니다.

MPEG-5 EVC (Essential Video Coding) is a state-of-the-art video coding standard, which was finalized by ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) in April 2020. The EVC standard was started to meet both the business and technical needs of the media industry in 2019, and it defines two profiles: the Baseline profile, which is royalty-free as it only consists of technologies that are more than 20 years old, and the Main profile, which contains enhanced tools to improve the compression efficiency.

According to the subjective video quality test officially held in MPEG, at an equivalent level of visual quality the Baseline and Main profiles save bit rate by approximately 40% compared to the H.264/AVC and HEVC standards, respectively.

The main purpose of our source code release is to make the MPEG-5 EVC standard more widely and easily used in the industry. For example, the high-performance, commercial-ready, open-source encoder XEVE can be directly deployed to over-the-top (OTT) services without additional development and enable high-quality encoding of video contents. XEVD, a lightweight, open-source decoder, can be directly deployed on embedded devices such as smartphones to play video streams from OTT services. Moreover, XEVE and XEVD can provide improved visual quality and cost-efficient delivery for real-time video conference services.

In order to make the EVC standard more widely and easily adopted to the media industry, Samsung Research released an open-source video encoder (XEVE) and decoder (XEVD) in June 2021 and has been continually updating them.

Here’s the official homepage for more details: https://www.mpeg.org/standards/MPEG-5/1/

At last in July 2022, Samsung Research contributed efforts to support an ARM core to provide an accelerated encoding and decoding on mobile devices. This means that it makes it possible to playback video in real-time on Android devices. The following is a demo clip of real time video playback with EVC codec on Galaxy S22 Ultra smartphone.

Video 1. Demo Clip: XEVE & XEVD project MPEG-5 EVC
(CC) Blender Foundation | mango.blender.org

Moreover, 3GPP recently published a technical report (TR 26.955) on Video codec characteristics for 5G-based services and applications. This report includes study results on the EVC standard for various 3GPP service scenarios, which shows the EVC standard would be suitable for mobile devices.

In the future, Samsung Research would provide open source implementations to support different types of CPUs for XEVE and XEVD for wider adoption of the EVC standard, and would be ready for a hardware implementation as well.

< Open Source Projects >

EVC encoder (XEVE): https://github.com/mpeg5/xeve

EVC decoder (XEVD): https://github.com/mpeg5/xevd