With the emergence of the HEVC project, TCSVT published the first special section of its kind in December 2010. The special section consisted of a number of video coding proposals that were submitted to the ISO/IEC SC29/WG11 (MPEG) and ITU-T SG16/Q6 (VCEG). Now, on the eve of its ratification of formally becoming a new video coding standard, we are very pleased to dedicate the entire issue to the topic of HEVC. The first part will be the special section on HEVC standard and is edited by J.-R. Ohm, G.J. Sullivan, and T. Wiegand. It consists of three invited papers. These excellent papers provide a comprehensive overview of the important aspects of the new standard. The second part is the special issue that was initiated by the Editor-in-Chief in 2012, and the Guest Editors were carefully selected from the members of our regular editorial team. Seventy two submissions were received in response to our call for papers, and unfortunately, we could only accommodate 18 due to our limited space.