The ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 11, a.k.a. MPEG video – ITU video, a.k.a. JCT-VC, has issued a committee draft of H.265, or HEVC. HEVC stands for High Efficiency Video Coding and is the next generation video coding standard. The algorithm’s main goal is to achieve the same video quality at half the bitrates of H.264. More resolutions are also offered. The final standardization approval date is scheduled for January 2013, with a standardization draft due in July 2012.
The Fraunhofer site is maintaining the source and some documentation.
We’re following HEVC as it develops. Here is a pdf of the HEVC requirements document, w11872. The requirements document does specify video conferencing. This implies a low algorithmic delay and overall low latency HEVC profile, at minimum. The fundamental trade off of the standard is increased computational complexity to achieve higher compression efficiency. Below is the HEVC application list from the MPEG requirements document.
• Home cinema
• Digital Cinema
• Surveillance
• Broadcast
• Realtime communications, video chat, video conferencing
• Mobile streaming, broadcast and communications
• Storage and playback of video
• Camcorders
• Video On Demand
• Internet streaming, download and play
• Remote video presentation and remote computer graphics display
• 3D video
• Telepresence
• Content production and distribution
• Medical imaging