New Video Standard - Solveig Multimedia presents 'Zond 265', the first professional H.265 Analyzer for Software Development worldwide

TOMSK, RUSSIA, May 14, 2012 (Press-News.org) Two months ago, the new video standard 'High Efficiency Video Coding' (HEVC), currently better known as H.265, has been officially defined. It will become an international standard from July 2012 and will be applied as an approved new video standard from 2013. Middle of year 2013 most mobile video services and presumably the whole HD TV transmission will be based on the new H.265 standard.

Releasing 'Zond 265', Solveig Multimedia is the first to offer a market-ready HEVC/H.265 bit stream analyzer. The new software will help software engineers to develop H.265-compliant software and codecs in order to be able to present new H.265-compliant products in 2013.

Developing own codecs, firmware and software using 'Zond 265'

'Zond 265' allows software developers to read out all the important information per frame and per block and to understand how to adapt their codecs and devices to H.265. The analysis provides standard information like time stamp, frame sizes or frame types as well as various additional information which can be displayed per graphics or per table:

- Information concerning NAL (Network Abstraction Layer): like H.264, the new H.265 standard is going to use an advanced NAL in order to adapt video compression to modern streaming requirements. H.265 will be much more efficient than previous video compression. 'Zond 265' offers separate analysis for both VCL and non-VCL NAL units, analyzing size and bitstream offset.

- Bit Distribution: the effort for using, for example, SplitFlag or PartMode is calculated and graphically presented relative to frame size in bits.

- Coding Units: unlike previous compression technologies that use one-size macro blocks, H.265 uses coding units, which are variable by size and format and are composed of prediction and transform units. 'Zond 265' is able to display all the coefficients of a coding unit separately as well as specify the quantizers used for the coding unit's coefficients.

- Prediction and Transform Units. Important elements of efficient compression are spatial and temporal predictions of image pixels. Coding Units in HEVC get described by Prediction and Transform Units, which can have an asymmetrical form and a variable pixel size up to 4x4 pixels. The Zond 265 shows type, size and form of these Units.

- Motion Vectors: as already known since H.261, motion vectors will play an important role in H.265, too. They give possibility to refer to similar parts of image and furthermore they keep motions smooth at a high compression. 'Zond 265' displays prediction block displacement versus a reference frame.

- Complete decoding information: all parts of the decoding process can be analyzed separately, the 'predicted picture' can then be displayed and compared with the final picture.

- Deblocking Filter: high-value codecs have been containing deblocking filters as an established standard for years, using them to smooth the picture at the edges of macro blocks or coding units. With 'Zond 265', pictures can be shown with or without deblocking filter influence, which enables developers to control smoothing effect and efficiency of H.265 deblocking.

"For us, 'Zond 265' is a gigantic project in which we invested a lot of work and energy", Dmitry Vergeles, CEO of Solveig Multimedia, who has become chief developer in this issue as well, resumes. "We started working on this project without even knowing exactly how the new standard would be like. This year in February, H.265 was finally presented. Developing 'Zond 265' has been our major concern since then, and today we are able to provide the world first professional H.265 analyzer. Of course we are proud imagining and looking forward to finding some Solveig technology in quite many products in 2 or 3 years."

H.265 new streaming standard and full HD standard from 2013

The new Video standard H.265, officially presented with the name HEVC, will be widely introduced in 2013 and successively replace all H.264 based applications. The current technologies based on H.264 video compression include Full HD-TV, MP4 and Blue-ray.

50 percent reduced data volume - consistently high quality

The replacement of H.264 is going to keep up a high picture quality and again reduces the amount of transferred data by 50 %. This huge step has been enabled by increasing the complexity of the coding process enormously. As a consequence, the requirements on both software and hardware, especially on new graphic boards, are to increase. More than 20 improved or entirely new coding technologies had been necessary to cut the already highly compressed data amount of H.624 down on half.In addition to the enormous compression, an improved NAL also optimizes high-resolution videos' streaming characteristics. H.265 offers free scalability up to 7680 x 4320 pixels, making it a sustainable standard for post-Full-HD-times. Compared to the conventional MPEG2 format, H.265 provides a video of equivalent quality in one sixth of its size. The mobile market will possibly be the major profiteer of the new standard, so developing H.265 compatible firmware for multimedia devices will be one of the great tasks of this year. H.265 has been developed by the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding, a collaboration of MPEG and VCEG.

Price, availability, operating systems

The H.265 Analyzer 'Zond 265' is available as a first-to-market beta version on request from Solveig Multimedia. A developer's license will be available at the expense of 2650$ USD plus taxes/VAT. All updates within a major version are included. A ten framed demo can be downloaded from Solveig Multimedia Website ( http://www.solveigmm.com/en/products/zond ). 'Zond 265' is supported by Windows XP/Vista/7. Linux and Mac Versions are coming soon.

Solveig Multimedia is a research and software development company specializing in digital video/audio products and multimedia solutions