NETVC
NETVC was the name given to a planned royalty-free video codec that was intended to be developed in the former Internet Video Codec working group of the IETF.[1][2] It was intended to provide a royalty-free alternative to industry standards such as H.264/AVC and HEVC that have required licensing payments for many uses. The chairs of the working group were Matthew Miller of Outer Planes and Mo Zanaty of Cisco Systems.[2] A list of criteria to be met by the new video standard was produced in April 2020 as Informational RFC 8761,[3] and the working group was closed.[2]
Concept
The October 2015 basic draft requirements for NETVC were support for a bit depth of 8-bits to 10-bits per sample, 4:2:0 chroma subsampling, 4:4:4 YUV, low coding delay capability, feasible real time decoder/encoder software implementations, temporal scalability, and error resilience tools.[4] The October 2015 optional draft requirements for NETVC included support for a bit depth of up to 16-bits per sample, 4:2:2 chroma subsampling, RGB video, auxiliary channel planes, high dynamic range, and parallel processing tools.[4]
History
On March 24, 2015, Xiph.org's Daala codec was presented to the IETF as a candidate for NETVC.[1][5][6] Daala coding techniques have been proposed to the IETF for inclusion into NETVC.[2]
On July 22, 2015, Cisco Systems' Thor video codec was presented to the IETF as a candidate for their NETVC video standard.[7] Thor is being developed by Cisco Systems and uses some Cisco elements that are also used by HEVC.[8] The Constrained Low-Pass Filter (CLPF) and motion compensation that are used in Thor were tested with Daala.[9]
At the IETF there are now also other partners involved in the development of NETVC.[8][9]
At the IETF meeting 101 in March 2018 xvc was presented by Divideon as another candidate. Thor developer Steinar Midtskogen confirmed that a subset of xvc that Divideon considers royalty-free has better compression than Thor at comparable complexity settings. It was agreed to pause physical meetings of the working group to see how the market for royalty-free video formats develops given that the teams behind several of the format candidates presented instead chose to develop a royalty-free standard in the AOM forum.[10]
After publishing RFC 8761 "Video Codec Requirements and Evaluation Methodology"[3] in April 2020, the Internet Video Codec working group was closed.[11]
Schedule
The planned schedule for the development of NETVC is:[12]
- April 2018: Informational document on requirements and evaluation criteria.
- July 2018: Informational document on test results, initial codec specification and reference implementation.
- December 2018: Standards documents on codec specification and storage format specification.
References
- ^ a b "Birds of a Feather Meetings (IETF Pre-WG Efforts)". Internet Engineering Task Force. Retrieved 2015-08-05.
- ^ a b c d Netvc Status Pages
- ^ a b Filippov, A., Norkin, A., and J. Alvarez, "Video Codec Requirements and Evaluation Methodology", RFC 8761, DOI 10.17487/RFC8761, April 2020
- ^ a b A. Filippov (2015-10-19). "Video Codec Requirements and Evaluation Methodology". IETF. Retrieved 2015-11-08.
- ^ Lucian Armasu (2015-03-25). "IETF Begins Standardization Process For Next-Generation 'NETVC' Video Codec (Daala)". Tom's Hardware. Retrieved 2015-08-05.
- ^ "NETVC BoF" (PDF). Internet Engineering Task Force. 2015-03-24. Retrieved 2015-08-06.
- ^ "NETVC IETF 93". Internet Engineering Task Force. Retrieved 2015-08-11.
- ^ a b "Thor" (PDF). Internet Engineering Task Force. Retrieved 2015-08-11.
- ^ a b NETVC Hackathon Results IETF 93 (Prague) (PDF)
- ^ NETVC working group session at IETF102, Internet Engineering Task Force, 2018-07-19, retrieved 2019-03-24
- ^ IETF NETVC Mail Archive
- ^ "Internet Video Codec (netvc)". IETF. Retrieved 2015-08-02.