UCI AVC & SVC A-OK
UCI AVC & SVC A-OK by Dave Michels
The Unified Communications Interoperability Forum (UCI Forum) announced a specification for H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10 AVC and SVC Modes Version 1.0. It was an important milestone for both the UCI Forum and the video communications industry as a whole. It may sound like a small step, but a specification for H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10 AVC and SVC Modes Version 1.0 is a great leap for video-kind.
The UCI Forum is not a standards organization. It didn’t define the international standard H.264 SVC. Instead, the forum addressed the flexibility within the standard. There were so many options that interoperability between compliant vendors was difficult at best. This new H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10 AVC and SVC Modes Version 1.0 specification provides a best practices implementation for video encoding and decoding intended to facilitate interoperability.
The UCI Forum is a vendor consortium. It includes Microsoft, Polycom, and Vidyo, and most other vendors actively involved in video conferencing with the major exception of Cisco. The timing is important because H.264 SVC is building momentum with software-based solutions. Polycom and Microsoft have begun embracing it, but it is mostly associated with Vidyo which helped lay the initial groundwork for the standard. Frost & Sullivan research finds that the market for software-based clients and executive systems has outpaced growth in the high-end room systems endpoint segment for several years.
Some might question why the UCI Forum, Microsoft, Polycom and others are rallying behind H.264 SVC when H.265 is likely around the corner. H.265 is working its way through the standards groups and does offer significant bandwidth savings, but requires considerably higher processor requirements in the codec. H.265 will likely build traction first with broadcast streaming solutions instead of video conferencing. H.264 SVC offers big improvements over AVC with existing hardware and room systems. Also, SVC is more aligned with the rising popularity of personal endpoints on non-QoS enhanced networks because it is more resilient to packet loss.
The UCI Forum-approved H.264/SVC specification defines a carefully selected set of capabilities that have proven to be effective in real-life deployments from different vendors. The specification takes into consideration the needs of UC users that use various devices, ranging from handheld and mobile devices (e.g., smart phones, tablets, and notepads) to larger, location systems (e.g., desktop computers and video conference suites) to connect into visual collaboration meetings.