codecs

Video: Codec Comparison from TCO and Compression Efficiency Perspective

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

AVC, now 16 years old, is long in the tooth but supported by billions of devices. The impetus to replace it comes from the drive to serve customers with a lower cost/base and a more capable platform. Cue the new contenders VVC and AV1 – not to mention HEVC. It’s no surprise they comptes better then AVC (also known as MPEG 4 and h.264) but do they deliver a cost efficient, legally safe codec on which to build a business?

Thierry Fautier has done the measurements and presents them in this talk. Thierry explains that the tests were done using reference code which, though unoptimised for speed, should represent the best quality possible from each codec and compared 1080p video all of which is reproduced in the IBC conference paper.

Licensing is one important topic as, by some, HEVC is seen as a failed codec not in terms of its compression but rather in the réticente by many companies to deploy it which has been due to the business risk of uncertain licensing costs and/or the expense of the known licensing costs. VVC faces the challenge of entering the market and avoiding these concerns which MPEG is determined to do.

Thierry concludes by comparing AVC against HEVC, AV1 and VVC in terms of deployment dates, deployed devices and the deployment environment. He looks at the challenge of moving large video libraries over to high-complexity codecs due to cost and time required to re-compress. The session ends with questions from the audience.
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Speaker

Thierry Fautier Thierry Fautier
President-Chair at Ultra HD Forum,
VP Video Strategy, Harmonic

Video: What to do after per-title encoding

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

Per-title encoding is a common method of optimising quality and compression by changing the encoding options on a file-by-file basis. Although some would say the start of per-scene encoding is the death knell for per-title encoding, either is much better than the more traditional plan of applying exactly the same settings to each video.

This talk with Mux’s Nick Chadwick and Ben Dodson looks at what per-title encoding is and how to go about doing it. The initial work involves doing many encodes of the same video and analysing each for quality. This allows you to out which resolutions and bitrates to encode at and how to deliver the best video.

Ben Dodson explains the way they implemented this at Mux using machine learning. This was done by getting computers to ‘watch’ videos and extract metadata. That metadata can then be used to inform the encoding parameters without the computer watching the whole of a new video.

Nick takes some time to explain MUX’s ‘convex hulls’ which give a shape to the content’s performance at different bitrates and helps visualise the optimum encoding parameters the content. Moreover, we see that using this technique, we can explore how to change resolution to create the best encode. This doesn’t always mean reducing the resolution; there are some surprising circumstances when it makes sense to start at high resolutions, even for low bitrates.

The next stage after per-title encoding is to segment the video and encode each segment differently which Nick explores and explains how to deliver different resolutions throughout the stream seamlessly switching between them. Ben takes over and explains how this can be implemented and how to chose the segment boundaries correctly, again, using a machine learning approach to analysis and decision making.

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Speakers

Nick Chadwick Nick Chadwick
Software Engineer,
Mux
Ben Dodson Ben Dodson
Data Scientist,
Mux

Video: General Codec Update

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

People are relentlessly trying to find better ways to compress video. For some, better means lower bitrate. For some, this means faster processing. But for everyone, this means new codecs and new standards.

Andreas Rossholm from Eyevinn Technology gives us the ‘lay of the land’ and explains the factors looming large in the minds of those who are developing the new standards.

Perceived Quality (QoE) is influenced by many factors, so is a moveable, translatable feast when it comes to pinning it down to a number. Andreas also talks about objective and subjective measurements are both valuable and so very different. We also see the advance from 2017 into 2018 of HEVC and AV1 with a look at the things to look out for when you hear about the results of a test. This will help you work out whether the results apply to you, or whether you need to do your own.

Andreas does a great job of explaining the types of things codecs are trying to minimise and the tools they’re using to succeed.

With a final look to the future and how codecs like AV1 and HEVC will perform, Andreas reminds us it’s not just about the codecs but also about how you use them; per-title parameters or per-shot?

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Speaker

Andreas Rossholm Andreas Rossholm
Media Specialist Consultant,
Eyevinn Technology

Video: VVC, EVC, LCEVC, WTF? – An update on the next hot codecs from MPEG

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones


The next-gen codecs are on their way: VVC, EVC, LCEVC but, given we’re still getting AV1 up and running, why do we need them and when will they be ready?

MPEG are working hard on 3 new video codecs, one in conjunction with the ITU, so Christian Feldmann from Bitmovin is here to explain what each does, the target market, whether it will cost money and when the standard will be finalised.

VVC – Versatile Video Codec – is a fully featured video codec being worked on as a successor to H.265, indeed the ITU call it H.266. MPEG call it MPEG-I Part 3. Christian explains the ways this codec is outperforming its peers including a flexible block partitioning system, motion prediction which can overlap neighbouring macroblocks and triangle prediction to name but three.

EVC is the Essential Video Codec which, intriguingly, offers a baseline which is free to use and a main profile which requires licences. The thinking here is that if you have licensing issues, you have the option of just turning off that feature which could five you extra leverage in patent discussions.

Finally, LCEVC – the Low Complexity Essential Video Codec allows for enhancement layers to be added on top of existing bitstreams. This can allow UHD to be used where only HD was possible before due to being able to share decoding between the ASIC and CPU, for example.

These all have different use cases which Christian explains well, plus he brings some test results along showing the percentage improvement over today’s HEVC encoding.

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Speaker

Christian Feldmann Christian Feldmann
Codec Engineer,
Bitmovin