At its 152nd meeting, MPEG advanced several video coding and media format standards to their final stages, including VVC, HEVC, and VSEI, and finalized a low-overhead image file format and new CMAF structural brands. Critically, the organization found evidence of video compression technologies surpassing VVC through a Call for Evidence, signaling interest in a next-generation video compression standard, potentially incorporating AI. These developments contribute to ongoing progress in video coding and media format standards essential for streaming innovation.
MPEG’s move to start work on a post-VVC standard just years after the latter's finalization highlights the pressure to integrate AI-driven efficiency gains into formal pipelines. By validating technologies that offer up to 20-50% bitrate reductions over VVC, MPEG is attempting to pre-empt proprietary AI compression solutions that threaten to fragment the market. For the ecosystem, this ensures that future hardware decoders will eventually support neural-network-based filters as a baseline rather than an optional add-on. Strategists should watch for the official Call for Proposals in July 2026, which will define the technical requirements for what many are already calling H.267.
The 152nd MPEG meeting in Geneva (October 7-11, 2025) marked a pivotal moment for video coding standardization. JVET completed evaluation of five Call for Evidence submissions from 16 companies and research labs, testing 20 codec configurations against VVC anchors. The evaluation found that 76 out of 120 test cases showed at least one submission with statistically significant compression gains over VTM, with neural-network-based approaches delivering clear perceptual improvements particularly for 8K HDR content. Several methods outperformed ECM16 in visual quality while achieving notable compression gains at lower complexity.
The roadmap document edited by Igor Curcio (Nokia), Arianne Hinds (Tencent), and Sachin Deshpande (Sharp) outlines MPEG's enhanced compression beyond VVC as a key technical requirement following the 152nd meeting. JVET is preparing a Call for Proposals for the next-generation video coding standard, with a draft planned for early 2026 and evaluation extending through 2027. Upcoming activities include refining test material, adding Reference Picture Resampling, and forming a new ad hoc group on hardware implementation complexity.
The fourth editions of VVC, HEVC, and VSEI advanced to Final Draft International Standard status at the same meeting, with new SEI messages supporting neural-network-based post-filtering, film grain synthesis, and generative-AI-based face encoding. These extensions create standardized signalling for machine learning components in decoding and rendering pipelines, establishing interoperability points that will inform the architecture of whatever succeeds VVC.
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