MPEG-5 Essential Video Coding (EVC), standardized as ISO/IEC 23094-1, is a video compression standard that has been completed in April 2020 by decision of MPEG Working Group 11 at its 130th meeting.
The standard consists of a royalty-free subset and individually switchable enhancements.
The publicly available requirements document outlines a development process that is defensive against patent threats: Two sets of coding tools, base and enhanced, are defined:
Each of the 21 payable tools can have separately acquired and separately negotiated and separately Traded License agreements. Each can be individually turned off and, when necessary, replaced by a corresponding cost free baseline profile tool. This structure makes it easy to fall back to a smaller set of tools in the future, if, for example, licensing complications occur around a specific tool, without breaking compatibility with already deployed decoders.
This video codec is compatible with hardware accelerators - decoders originally developed for older standards such as AVC/HEVC at least in the Baseline profile.
A proposal by Samsung, Huawei and Qualcomm forms the basis of EVC.
MPAI aims to significantly enhance the performance of EVC by improving or replacing traditional tools with AI-based tools, with the goal of reaching at least 25% improvement over the baseline profile of EVC.