Video: Get Ready For A Multiple Codec World

The codec world is fragmenting. None of the new entrants on to the market is expected to ever gain the universal status that AVC enjoys. This panel from Streaming Media East takes a look at how to prepare for this.

The panel kicks off discussing the differences between AVC and HEVC, VP9 and AV1 and moves on to discuss the pros and cons of supporting multiple codecs. Tarek from Twitch explains its partial adoption of VP9 – the reasons that it makes sense but the overheads which it brings the business.

Vittorio Giovara from Vimeo explains their reasons for using HEVC including their drive to be able to encode and deliver 10-bit video. Ellation’s Subhrendu Sarakar makes the point that managing codec changes and bitrate changes needs to be done carefully to ensure viewers that notice the change understand them and don’t feel there has been a reduction of quality.

After a brief discussion of encoding strongly characterised video types such as anime and gaming, the conversation moves on to AV1 and migrating from VP9 and there is an audience question on HEVC licensing and the lack of use of SVC (Scalable Video Coding)

It’s now relatively well known that Twitch deployed VP9 using FPGAs rather than as a software encoder which was the only way to get the real-time speed at 1080p60. The panel discusses encoding speed both in the encoder and decoder for VP9 and AV1 then finishes with a Q&A from the audience.

Watch now!

Speakers

Tim Siglin Tim Siglin
Founding Executive Director
Help Me! Stream
Tarek Amara Tarek Amara
Principal Video Specialist,
Twitch
Vittorio Giovara Vittorio Giovara
Senior Engineer, Video Encoding
Vimeo
Nathan Egge Nathan Egge
Video Codec Engineer,
Mozilla
Subhrendu Sarkar Subhrendu Sarkar
Senior Engineering Manager, Video Infrastructure & CMS,
Ellation

Video: Analysis of emerging video codecs: coding tools, compression efficiency and complexity


Delivering great quality, live video without breaking the bank is difficult. This talk looks at the different ways companies are dealing with this challenge.

NGCodec’s founder, Oliver Gunasekara, starts by quantifying the millions of dollars spent just by one company each year just on delivering their video and introduces the difficulties of CPU encoding compared to dedicated chips – ASICS and looks at how FPGAs fit in. Cloud-based FPGAs are available on AWS, Baidu, Alibaba and others.

After covering Twitch’s move to VP9 on FPGA, the talk finishes looking at on-premise implementation, Oliver looks at the cost of ownership of servers compared to Xilinx FPGA.

Speakers

Oliver Gunasekara Oliver Gunasekara
Founder. & CEO,
NGCodec

Video: JPEG-XS and ST 2110

JPEG XS is a brand-new, ultra-low latency standard delivering JPEG 2000 quality with 1000x lower latency; microseconds instead of milliseconds. This mezzanine compression standard promises compression ratios of up to 10:1, resolutions of up to 8K plus HDR and features frame rates from 24 to 120 fps.

Jean-Baptiste Lorent from intoPIX shows how JPEG-XS can be used with SMPTE ST-2110 stack. Part -22 of ST 2110 allows for transport of compressed video essence as an alternative to uncompressed essence – all the other elementary streams stay the same, just the video RTP payload changes. This approach saves a lot of bandwidth and keeps all the existing advantages of moving from SDI to IP at the same time.

Based on TICO which arrived in products four or more years ago allowing HD products to support UHD workflows, JPEG XS was also designed for visually lossless quality and maintaining that quality over multiple re-encoding stages. The combination of very-low microsecond-latency and relatively low bandwidth makes it ideal for remote production of live events.

Watch now!

Speaker

Jean-Baptiste Lorent Jean-Baptiste Lorent
Director Marketing & Sales
intoPIX

Video: Analysis of emerging video codecs: coding tools, compression efficiency and complexity

There continues to be fervent activity in codec development and it’s widely expected that there won’t be a single successor to AVC (h.264). Vying for one of the spots is AV1 but also MPEG’s VVC.

In this talk at SMPTE 2018, Julien Le Tanou from MediaKind compares the coding tools used by VVC and AV1 and explains the methodology he uses to compare the two codecs. We see the increase in decoding time compared to HEVC required for VVC as well as the famously slow AV1. We also see the bitrate savings with VVC performing better.

Julien also presents subjective results which are not correlated to the objective results and explains reasons for this.

Speakers

Julien Le Tanou Julien Le Tanou
Senior Engineer, Video Compression,
MediaKind