Open-Source Software Encode/Decode For H.266/VVC Progressing

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Open-Source Software Encode/Decode For H.266/VVC Progressing

The H.266 / Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard was finalized back in 2020 and while the hardware acceleration is currently limited to a few SoCs with video decode, in the years ahead there will likely be plenty of content encoded in H.266/VVC. The Fraunhofer HHI group in Germany has been working to ensure capable open-source support around this video compression standard with their VVenC encoder and VVdeC decoder...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Open-Source-VVC-H266

[ermo]

From the GH page:

fraunhoferhhi/vvenc is licensed under the BSD 3-Clause Clear License

A variant of the BSD 3-Clause License that explicitly does not grant any patent rights.

So this is essentially a way to encourage the use of an open source encoder/decoder, whilst explicitly allowing for the patent-holders to derive revenue if it is introduced into commercial systems or systems run by a large entity that derives value via other means than selling the product which uses the encoder/decoder?

Hm. At least they are "clear" about it.

[ALRBP]

Good to have a FOSS way to read this $#!1 if it ever gets adopted, but we have AV1 for a really open codec.

[Velocity]

What about AV2? AV1 codec bitstream is locked, but it is less 'good' than VVC i heard. So AV2 might compare to VVC?

If one wouldn't care about licensing, what would be the ideal codec to use at home for transcoding all your videos to, AV1, upcoming AV2 or VVC?

[avis]

What about AV2? AV1 codec bitstream is locked, but it is less 'good' than VVC i heard. So AV2 might compare to VVC?

If one wouldn't care about licensing, what would be the ideal codec to use at home for transcoding all your videos to, AV1, upcoming AV2 or VVC?

It depends on what you want to achieve. The best thing is of course not to transcode unless you have uncompressed sources which mostly the professionals do.

Transcoding from e.g. H.264 while trying to stay visually lossless is often ... impossible because all the encoders introduce encoding artifacts which are considered fine details which need to be reencoded which results in blowing up the resulting files. That depends on the source though. If you shoot the sky at perfect conditions without shaking your camera, reencoding into new codecs may result in huge savings, easily up to 10x. If you shoot something shaky with lots of moving objects and fine details, or e.g. when the bitrate is not sufficient, that could become impossible to reencode more efficiently.

At the moment both VVC and AV2 are nothing to talk about - the first one still doesn't have enough support (there are basically no ready publicly available players), AV2 development has just begun.

There are patches to enable VVC decoding for ffmpeg (check this topic for more info), so if you feel adventurous you may try encoding using vvenc. I've already tried it and I was pleasantly impressed. It's significantly better than AV1 even at this early stage of development and no actual people trying it yet. I've tried the slowest/best presets for libaom and SVT-AV1 and both destroy fine details - of course I'm talking about trying to encode at the same bitrate.

[MorrisS.]

What's the necessity of VVC, having been developed AV1?

[avis]

What's the necessity of VVC, having been developed AV1?

No necessity.

None, it's patent infested crap which needs to die. Luckily you have no relationship to professional production workflow where no one has ever seen VP9 or AV1 and everything is based on H.264 and H.265 as well as mezzanine codecs you've never heard about such as HQX.

[archkde]

From the GH page:



So this is essentially a way to encourage the use of an open source encoder/decoder, whilst explicitly allowing for the patent-holders to derive revenue if it is introduced into commercial systems or systems run by a large entity that derives value via other means than selling the product which uses the encoder/decoder?

Hm. At least they are "clear" about it.

It's the same story as with other MPEG codecs. Fraunhofer grants you a permissive copyright license to their code, just like others do for their H.264 or H.265 implementations. The patents can be licensed from MPEG-LA. Fraunhofer cannot grant you a patent license because they don't own all patents, so they are really just being clear here.

[DanL]

I'm not really looking forward to new codecs. AV1 should be good enough for most cases and it already took way too long for AMD and Nvidia to get hardware support, especially in their midrange and lower end GPU's.

[nazar-pc]

It is a dead on arrival codec unless situation around patents is dramatically better than with HEVC, which I don't think is realistically going to happen.