HEVC Documentation

[rudyb]

Hi everyone,
I have been trying to understand the details of HEVC encoder.
I have been struggling to find very informative and details explanation of HEVC.
Most of the papers that I have been reading for the last month or so are highly academic oriented, and not much explanatory.
For example, I read lots of papers about intra-prediction and how to do RD cost analysis. And lately, I have started to tackle CABAC.
But the best way that I find to get answers to my questions is actually by following the HM-14 code very closely.
Even though the entire code could get very intense to follow, but I found it somewhat better to understand than reading a paper with the same information.
However, it is very time consuming and if I lost my patient, I get lost in the code easily. I was wondering if anyone knows of a great resource that I can use to facilitate the understanding of H265 ?!
Or maybe if someone has taken some notes about some details of H265 that can share. Or even if someone knows of any documents or suggestion to follow HM14 !

Thanks in advance,
--Rudy

[foxyshadis]

You might find Overview of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) Standard (http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6316136) right up your alley, it's 20 pages of technical overview, although parts of it assume familiarity with AVC. However, it mostly glosses over CABAC. For that, you should read Context-Based Adaptive Binary Arithmetic Coding in the H.264/AVC Video Compression Standard (http://www.cs.sfu.ca/CC/820/li/material/source/papers/CABAC.pdf), if you want to understand how and why it works; the HEVC version is very similar, but with fewer contexts and the addition of Wavefront.

Beyond that, the spec is a much better place to start than the code. Although it's entirely about decoding, with a few annexes about encoding, it's usually easier to understand the structure of an HEVC file by starting from the whole.

If you want the rationale about why various pieces were included or rejected, you can find all of the submitted proposals, meeting minutes, and test results in the JCT-VC document archive (http://wftp3.itu.int/av-arch/jctvc-site/) and their mailing list (http://mailman.rwth-aachen.de/mailman/private/jct-vc/). You have to sign up (http://mailman.rwth-aachen.de/mailman/listinfo/jct-vc) to see the archives, but traffic has dwindled to a trickle now, it won't flood your mailbox.

[x265_Project]

I would also recommend this Doom9 Thread on How HEVC Works (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=167081).