The Reconfigurable Video Coding Standard [Standards in a Nutshell]

More than two decades of research in digital video technologies, together with the emergence of successful international standards for digital video compression, have led to a wide variety of digital video products using video compression for professional and consumer applications. Although many of these video compression standards share common and/or similar coding tools, there is currently no explicit way to exploit such commonalities at the level of the specifications nor at the level of implementations. Moreover, the possibility of taking advantage of the benefits of the continuous improvements of coding technology is only possible by replacing an old standard with a new one. This usually results in the replacement of the existing multimedia devices with new ones capable of handling the new deployed standards. Such necessity is not always well accept-ed by the public and professionals for obvious reasons.