The New EVC Codec
June 18, 2021 - MPEG-5 Essential Video Coding (EVC) is a new video compression standard proposed by Samsung, Huawei and Qualcomm. It has been developed with the following requirements in mind:
Two profiles (sets of coding tools) have been defined for EVC:
Baseline - Royalty free.
Coding tools that are at least 20 years old, or submitted with a "royalty-free" declaration.
Performance: Similar quality to H.264, at ~31% lower bitrate.
Main - Higher performance, but royalty-bearing.
Adds a small number of additional tools, each providing a significant improvement in compression performance. The tools are isolated from each other so that they can be switched on/off independently.
Performance: Similar quality to HEVC Main 10, at ~26% lower bitrate.
EVC Support in Zond 265
Zond 265 is an in-depth viewer and analyzer of HEVC bitstreams. Version 5 now adds full support for EVC bitstreams.
Information Windows
The Stream Stats window contains general statistics about the EVC bitstream file as a whole, such as bitrate, average frame size, resolution and number of frames. The Toolset info window shows which 'tools' (features) have been enabled for encoding the current bitstream. Finally, the Bitstream tab shows the NAL units in the bitstream file, and their parameters.
EVC Analysis Features
Zond 265 supports the following analysis functions for EVC (in a similar way to HEVC):