The Reconfigurable Video Coding (RVC) is an MPEG initiative to provide an innovative framework of video coding development. This framework offers a way to overcome the lack of interoperability between the many video codecs deployed in the market. Indeed, an RVC codec is described using the dataflow programming paradigm which permits flexibility and reusability. Two standards have been produced by the RVC working group:
RVC was motivated by the following observations:
Work on Reconfigurable Video Coding started in March 2004 during an MPEG meeting at Munich with the research of common elements among existing MPEG standards. After more than two years of work, it was found that even if their specifications were strictly different they had some very similar architectures and related data flow.A Call for Proposals was made during the 76th MPEG meeting at Montreux, this call aimed to collect technologies to describe some unified descriptions of the MPEG video technology.The next meeting saw the proposal to build a MPEG Reconfigurable Video Coding framework accepted, and work on the development of standard components started.