Multiview (e.g. stereoscopic) content provides users with a fully immersive and compelling quality of experience when watching videos. This type of content is gaining new momentum thanks to the development and commercialisation of Virtual Reality (VR) headsets such as Apple Vision Pro and Oculus Quest. The delivery of Multiview video calls for new challenges to the video coding community, being frames composed of multiple views (two in the case of stereoscopic). Standardisation bodies such as ISO/IEC MPEG and ITU-T VCEG envisaged the compression of Multiview content with the H.265/HEVC standard, extended to efficiently tackle the intrinsic data redundancies present across different views. Thanks to the availability of VR headsets, content providers and codec vendors are now deploying solutions supporting the Multiview extension of H.265/HEVC (collectively known as MV-HEVC).

This talk will introduce the MV-HEVC standard from the encoder’s designed perspective, starting with an overview of the standard’s design and tools supported. The focus will then move on to consider the challenges faced when implementing practical encoding solutions such as fast mode decision and rate control. This talk was presented at Demuxed 2024, a conference by and for engineers working in video. Every year we host a conference with lots of great new talks like this in San Francisco. Learn more at https://demuxed.com