Samsung and several other industry leaders officially welcome the arrival of the MPEG-5 EVC codec. Short for “Essential Video Coding”, the new standard emerged as a key element in the segment’s latest 8K push.
Well, that’s how the likes of Samsung, Huawei, and Qualcomm perceive it; at least according to their joint statement of support for the latest multimedia codec from earlier this week.
Not that anyone should have expected a different response from the said trio of electronics juggernauts. After all, Qualcomm, Huawei, and Samsung all made significant contributions to MPEG-5 EVC.
The standard itself released just last week, promising to usher in a new era of multimedia quality available to consumers. As expected, its creators all vowed to license their patents relevant to MPEG-5 EVC at reasonable rates.
How reasonable those terms will truly be is still up in the air. That’s because concrete licensing rates won’t be agreed on before mid-2022. Samsung, Huawei, and Qualcomm claim there’s no rush, however.
After all, the current global market instability is hardly conducive to swift MPEG-5 EVC adoption. What’s missing is widespread 5G deployment which would raise consumer demand for high-definition content.
MPEG-5 Codec: The future of 8K
The newly released codec solution is primarily aimed at improving 4K and 8K compression. It’s hence good news for the TV industry, though its potential benefits are much more far-reaching than that.
For example, VR and AR content could mount a smartphone comeback with the help of MPEG-5 EVC. A major boost to HDR standardization is also on the cards. In fact, it’s basically a given.
At the end of the day, it’s MPEG-5 EVC is a software solution, so even existing hardware should benefit from it. Of course, its creators are planning on making bank from this breakthrough.
The silver lining for third parties is that Samsung, Huawei, and Qualcomm will be offering a royalty-free variant of the codec. An “MPEG-5 EVC lite”, if you will. Needless to say, that particular option won’t be the most efficient solution on the market.
The exact differences between the two sets of tools are still up in the air. For that, we’ll have to wait for some more practical applications of the standard to emerge.
Regardless, MPEG-5 EVC is arguably the 8K codec of the future. That’s without even accounting for the many benefits it can offer to 4K and mixed-reality content production. All of which makes it a technology to look out for in the coming years.