A private company from the UK called V-nova claims to have developed a new codec called PERSEUS that is at least twice as efficient as HEVC. It is licensing the codec, similarly as with other codecs. The article from Videonet provides more information.
It will take some time to verify if the claims hold up; the first demo’s are quite convincing. Keep in mind HEVC compression today is not mature yet: there is a lot of improvement possible. So a side by side comparison now is not a “full story”. Nevertheless: if the codec performs significantly better today than HEVC will do in the foreseable future it may make serious impact in the industry. A factor 2 bandwidth gain is worth billions in the fast growing OTT industry for example.
An intrinsic property of the codec is that it seems to be “hierarchical”; a property often aspired to but never deployed. Practical value is low – the bold statement and comparisons presented from the hierarchical advantage perspective by V-Nova degrade confidence.
Stealth compression company claims mind-blowing performance gains | VideoNet.
Update: April 10, 2015
V-net has gathered opinions from the industry. Key issues for PERSEUS to overcome:
- Proving the claim of 2x+ compression gain holds up under a broad set of content inputs and compression rates
- Gaining traction with consumer decoder silicon manufacturers in firmware/hardware.
- Ensure the third party patent situation is clarified: the compression field is littered with patents; lawsuits may come to V-Nova and their customers if PERSEUS implementations violate those patents.
In view of the problems of (2) and (3) broad consumer product implementation will take quite a while even if the compression rates prove to be robust.
Here is new the Videonet article link.
