Modern Standards for Video Communications: from MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 to H.264/AVC, SVC, MVC, and H.265/HEVC

Video encoding for multimedia services over communication networks has significantly advanced in recent years with the development of the highly efficient and flexible H.264 SVC video coding standard. The emerging H.265/HEVC video coding standard as well as 3D video coding will further advance video coding for multimedia communications. This tutorial article gives an overview of these new video coding standards and reviews their implications for multimedia communications. We showcase the effects of the video coding advances from MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 to H.264 SVC and H.265/HEVC on the video traffic for single-layer (non-scalable) video coding for conventional 2D video. Our study is the first to examine the H.265/HEVC traffic variability for long videos. We also illustrate the video traffic characteristics of scalable H.264 SVC video coding as well as video coding for 3D video.