Quote:
Originally Posted by easyfab
Has someone any news of when the final release of the HEVC file format will be out ?
|
This seems to be one of the "What on earth is going on!?" kind of things right now.
Last year's draft finished in the pre-final ballot in April, and there were comments published regarding it and so forth. These were published on mp4-sys. According to the documents, MPEG seems to be handling the development of this document and new versions have seemingly since been put out, but the working drafts seem to only be located on some semi-secret MPEG document tracker. So yeah, we the mere mortals are currently completely left out from the whole process so that we do not even see what the status is. Quite a setback after having such a nice experience with HEVC itself, with little to nothing being behind walls of user names and passwords.
GPAC happens to have one of the editors on board, and thus is the only OSS project that can currently implement the worked upon draft. Copying GPAC's implementations has always been an affair that one should preferably not indulge oneself in (even more so without any specifications on hand!), so all you can say from their code is that things have changed since the last public draft.
Then, in May, it is decided that 14496-15 should be renamed (as it will no longer only host AVC, but HEVC as well). A two-month ballot is initiated on the change, and it is finished in mid-July. 14496-15 was thus renamed to "NAL File Format".
And then... nothing. The Vienna File-format Meeting Report published on 2nd of August notes the following things:
- 1.4.1 m30312 ISOMBFF extensions to allow storage of HEVC coded still images and image sequences along with other ISOMBFF compatible media
- 1.4.2 m30313 Carriage of image sequences using HEVC-FF
- 1.4.3 m30314 Signalling of cover pictures for HEVC-FF image sequence tracks
- 1.4.4 m30255 Sub tracks for HEVC file format
- 1.4.5 m30294 Describing HEVC Tiles in ISOBMFF
- 1.4.6 m30371 Proposal to support tile access in the HEVC File Format
None of these seem to be related to basic HEVC video in a container any more. Still image sequences, subtracks (see: MVC/SVC) and other ways of giving tiles a "place" to be signalled in the container instead of just being a part of the video data. At this point, I really don't know what is going any more to be honest. Might even poke mp4-sys about all this. Mraulet, who has access to the editors via GPAC, was already saying in early July that they were trying to finish it up. Yet we do not even have a final draft yet
P.S.
My grievances are mostly with the fact that there is currently close to zero clarity to the outside world regarding the development, bundled together with the fact that there is a single software project that just happens to have the access. This leaves libavformat, L-SMASH as well as matroska-devel (yes, most people on the mailing list seem to want to use the 14496-15 amd2 extradata for Matroska, not the DivX implementation), among others, all hanging on... absolutely nothing, while others seem to be given the way to go further.