The battles over video codecs – in which high quality mobile video has been an increasingly important consideration – have become a “bloodbath” in recent years, according to Fabio Murra, SVP of products and marketing at video compression specialist V-Nova. In this race, the main contenders are AV1 and HEVC (or H.265, the successor to the ubiquitous H.264 or MPEG-4). But a dark horse in the picture, LCEVC (low complexity enhancement video coding), also known as MPEG-5 part 2, provides a different approach. It specifies a data stream structure made up of a base stream (decodable by a hardware decoder) and an enhancement stream (which can be processed in software). It can act as an enhancement to any of the…