Uvg266: BSD licensed VVC encoder based on Kvazaar released | Hacker News Reader

Uvg266: BSD licensed VVC encoder based on Kvazaar released

github.com

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Our Kvazaar HEVC encoder was converted to the new standard during the past couple of years. Some general info on the conversion process for the Intra part is described in our open-access paper: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9690938

Congratulations as you beat even the x265 team to release possibly the first open source VVC encoder. It is unfortunate you wont get much response as HN is pretty much Anti HEVC and VVC.

Thanks! Fraunhofer HHI has already released vvenc ages ago: https://github.com/fraunhoferhhi/vvenc and it's _really_ good on compression performance as well as speed. The difference is that we used our own HEVC encoder as the base whereas Fraunhofer (and most likely x265 team) use the reference encoder VTM: https://vcgit.hhi.fraunhofer.de/jvet/VVCSoftware_VTM giving them all the tools from the beginning. We are aware of the problems with HEVC and VVC, and it's sad to find out that the VVC licensing terms are even worse for open-source...

>and it's sad to find out that the VVC licensing terms are even worse for open-source...

What and why is that ?

According to what I've read, MPEG LA would also charge the some fees for "free software". It makes me wonder if e.g. ffmpeg would adopt VVC would they have to pay for it? https://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?Art...

I see what you mean. It probably wouldn't matter if a user is compiling from source and not downloading the binaries. It is also unfortunate the terms couldn't be simpler.

It seems most internet companies in the west ( dominated by US ) are not going to use VVC, while India, China and Japan are all ready to jump on the VVC tech. Broadcasting has shown interest in VVC as well.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3339825.3394927

>"This paper presents Kvazaar 2.0 HEVC encoder that is the new release of our academic open-source software (github.com/ultravideo/kvazaar). Kvazaar 2.0 introduces novel inter coding functionality that is built on advanced rate-distortion optimization (RDO) scheme and speeded up with several early termination mechanisms, SIMD-optimized coding tools, and parallelization strategies. Our experimental results show that the proposed coding scheme makes Kvazaar 125 times as fast as the HEVC reference software HM on the Intel Xeon E5-2699 v4 22-core processor at the additional coding cost of only 2.4% on average. In constant quantization parameter (QP) coding, Kvazaar is also 3 times as fast as the respective preset of the well-known practical x265 HEVC encoder and is still able to attain 10.7% lower average bit rate than x265 for the same objective visual quality."

Does the licence of the code matter if the IP that it is based makes you vulnerable to lawsuits?

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versatile_Video_Coding#Licensi...

Well, I think it does if any company wants to take use of our software and if they pay for the licensing fees, there should be no problems. ..and for personal use it might be hard to crack down ;) I might add that we are a university research group developing the software..

Why work on this instead of furthering av1 or av2?

Right now it's mostly that we have been working on the HEVC for the past 10 years and it's basically just easier for us to continue with the next version developed from that. Would be much harder to "start from scratch" with the other codec families. However, we are aware of the licensing problems so maybe something will change later ;)

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