NETVC


The Internet Video Codec is a standardization project for a royalty-free video codec hosted by the IETF. It is intended to provide a royalty-free alternative to industry standards such as MPEG-4 and HEVC that require licensing payments for many uses.
The group has put together a list of criteria to be met by the new video standard.

Concept

The October 2015 basic draft requirements for NETVC are support for a bit depth of 8-bits to 10-bits per sample, 4:2:0 chroma subsampling, 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 is 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, and parallel processing tools.

History

On March 24, 2015, Xiph.org'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, Cisco Systems' 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 and motion compensation that are used in Thor were tested with Daala.
At the IETF there are now also other partners involved in the development of NETVC.
At the 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 considers royalty-free has better compression than Thor at comparable complexity settings. It was agreed to pause physical meetings of the working group to see how the market for royalty-free video formats develops given that the teams behind several of the format candidates presented instead chose to develop a royalty-free standard in the AOM forum.
After publishing RFC 8761 "Video Codec Requirements and Evaluation Methodology" in April 2020, NETVC was concluded.

Schedule

The planned schedule for the development of NETVC is: