Since its formal approval, in 2013, the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC)
standard has established as the new state of the art on video compression.
When compared with the previous standards, it has been shown that HEVC
encoders can achieve equivalent subjective visual quality as H.264/AVC
encoders, when using approximately 50% less of the bit rate. However, such
coding efficiency comes at cost of a substantial increase of the computational
complexity of both the video encoder and the decoder. As a consequence,
real-time implementations of HEVC codecs is still an open and challenging
task, only attained by using special purpose circuits and systems.