NETVC was the name given to a planned

royalty-free Royalty-free (RF) material subject to copyright or other intellectual property rights may be used without the need to pay royalties or license fees for each use, per each copy or volume sold or some time period of use or sales. Computer standard ...

video codec A video codec is software or hardware that compresses and decompresses digital video. In the context of video compression, '' codec'' is a portmanteau of ''encoder'' and ''decoder'', while a device that only compresses is typically called an ...

that was intended to be developed in the former Internet Video Codec working group of the

IETF The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a standards organization for the Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). It has no formal membership roster or requirements an ...

. It was intended to provide a royalty-free alternative to industry standards such as H.264/AVC and HEVC that have required licensing payments for many uses. The chairs of the working group were Matthew Miller of Outer Planes and Mo Zanaty of

Cisco Systems Cisco Systems, Inc., commonly known as Cisco, is an American-based multinational digital communications technology conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develops, manufactures, and sells networking hardware, ...

. A list of criteria to be met by the new video standard was produced in April 2020 as Informational RFC 8761, and the working group was closed.

Concept

The October 2015 basic draft requirements for NETVC were support for a bit depth of 8-bits to 10-bits per sample, 4:2:0

chroma subsampling Chroma subsampling is the practice of encoding images by implementing less resolution for chroma information than for luma information, taking advantage of the human visual system's lower acuity for color differences than for luminance. It is u ...

, 4:4:4 YUV, low coding delay capability, feasible real time decoder/encoder software implementations, temporal scalability, and error resilience tools. The October 2015 optional draft requirements for NETVC included support for a bit depth of up to 16-bits per sample, 4:2:2 chroma subsampling, RGB video, auxiliary channel planes,

high dynamic range High dynamic range (HDR) is a dynamic range higher than usual, synonyms are wide dynamic range, extended dynamic range, expanded dynamic range. The term is often used in discussing the dynamic range of various signals such as images, videos, au ...

, and parallel processing tools.

History

On March 24, 2015,

Xiph.org Xiph.Org Foundation is a nonprofit organization that produces free multimedia formats and software tools. It focuses on the Ogg family of formats, the most successful of which has been Vorbis, an open and freely licensed audio format and codec de ...

's Daala codec was presented to the IETF as a candidate for NETVC. Daala coding techniques have been proposed to the IETF for inclusion into NETVC. On July 22, 2015,

' Thor video codec was presented to the IETF as a candidate for their NETVC video standard. Thor is being developed by Cisco Systems and uses some Cisco elements that are also used by HEVC. The Constrained Low-Pass Filter (CLPF) and motion compensation that are used in Thor were tested with Daala.''NETVC Hackathon Results IETF 93 (Prague)''
(PDF) As of July 2015, in addition to Xiph and Cisco, there were also other participants involved in the project. At IETF meeting 101 in March 2018, xvc was presented by Divideon as another candidate. Thor developer Steinar Midtskogen confirmed that a subset of xvc that Divideon considered royalty-free had better compression than Thor at comparable complexity settings. It was agreed at that time to pause physical meetings of the working group to see how the market for royalty-free video formats further developed, given that the teams behind several of the format candidates that had been presented had chosen to join the AV1 standard development initiative of the Alliance for Open Media consortium, which had similar goals. After publishing RFC 8761 "Video Codec Requirements and Evaluation Methodology" in April 2020, the Internet Video Codec working group was closed.

Schedule

The planned schedule for the development of NETVC was: * April 2018: Informational document on requirements and evaluation criteria. * July 2018: Informational document on test results, initial codec specification and reference implementation. * December 2018: Standards documents on codec specification and storage format specification.

References

{{Compression formats Film and video technology Video compression