About MPEG-5 EVC Open Source

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/

New Feature of Supporting Mobile Devices

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