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The more advanced multi-view extension, MV-HEVC, effectively exploits visual similarities between multi-view videos and enables high compression efficiency. Each view in the multi-view sequence depends on the captured scene, the distance between cameras and recording angles. Increasing the distance between dependent viewpoints generates an inter-view disparity. This impacts the inter-view similarities, affects the disparity estimation and further increases the computational complexity of the MV-HEVC encoder. In this paper, an efficient earlier disparity estimation is proposed for low complexity MV-HEVC. This algorithm is based on reducing the complexity of disparity estimation by eliminating the inter-view offset. Moreover, the inter-view similarities are controlled by considering the reliability of each coding unit size in the search range. This reliability is estimated by reducing the number of searching points within a new limited window. For reliable motion estimation, we further proposed an earlier decision of coding units splitting in the dependent views according to those in the reference views. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve an average encoding time saving of 20.37%–40,61% with marginal performance degradation. • Visual adjustment between views can be improved by eliminating inter-view offsets. • Eliminating inter-view offsets reduces search time in the disparity estimation. • The visual adjustment allows a trade-off between encoding time and video quality. • An earlier decision of coding units splitting for reliable motion estimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]