HEVC given ward for its contribution to the television industry
Image/Photo Credit: The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences
The HEVC codec has won a Primtime Engineering Emmy for its contributions to the TV industry.
HEVC, which stands for High Efficiency Video Coding, has become the dominant codec for use in ultra high definition applications including Ultra HD Blu-ray and 4K video streaming. The codec offers increased efficiency compared to the previous generation of codecs, including the H.264/AVC code used in Blu-ray.
Visual tests confirmed early on that HEVC was much more efficient than H.264, especially at lower bitrates, which is why the code is also used in lower resolution content delivery and not just 4K content.
Generally speaking, the HEVC codec is about twice as efficient has H.264/AVC.
At 4K content delivery's nascency, there were many codec vying to become the codec of choice, but HEVC scored an early victory when streaming giant Netflix chose the codec to deliver its 4K content. This helped solve the typical "chicken and the egg" problem for new codecs, where the codec choice by hardware manufacturers relies on the existence of software content, and at the same time, the choice of codec for software relies on the availability of hardware support, and encouraged consumer electronics firms to include HEVC decoding support in their products.
This eventually led to the Blu-ray Disc Association to choose HEVC for the Ultra HD Blu-ray format, paving the way for HEVC to become the industry's standard for 4K delivery.
The Primetime Engineering Emmy for HEVC was awarded to the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC). The JCT-VC consists of engineers from the Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) and the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG).
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