Codecs

This video discusses how to choose a codec in 2021 and beyond.  Download the handout here. Here’s the video.  Here’s the Description Codecs like H.264 and AV1 are the key enabling technologies for all entertainment and business-oriented video distribution, whether movies distributed via Netflix or videoconferencing from Zoom and similar services. At a high level, codecs come from two …

Recently I received a shortlist of compression-related questions from a consulting buddy; he’s always been gracious in answering my questions and I wanted to return the favor. Since he’s asking, I thought others might be curious as well; hence this blog post that largely incorporates my responses to his questions, all relating to encoding H.264 files. Here are the questions: …

VVC is one of the three codecs to be launched by MPEG in 2020. I wrote about VVC extensively here (business side) and here (technical side), and wanted to provide some quick updates. By way of background, codecs have two sides, the performance side, and the business side. In this short article, I’ll address both. Fraunhofer’s VVenC Sets New Standards …

I’ve spent the last two months testing four AV1 codecs accessible via command-line arguments and I start testing VVC codecs next week. Trying to fairly and accurately test the capabilities of these codecs turned out to be a pretty grueling and messy task. The key challenge, of course, was creating the optimal video encoding command string for each codec. While …

Jan Ozer here. I spent the last 2 months working with four AV1 codecs, benchmarking them against each other and x264 and x265. I’m presenting my findings in this for-fee 75-minute webinar ($149.99).  There are two parts; the first shares what I learned about the codecs, and the second details what I learned about encoding with them and creating the …

Just a quick note to let you know that I’ve published a comprehensive report that documents the testing, quality, and performance of the Low Complexity Enhanced Video Codec (LCEVC) as developed by V-Nova and in the process of becoming standardized by MPEG. By way of background, I’ve been consulting with V-Nova to test LCEVC using a range of test files …

Previous tests presented here showed that a Windows version of FFmpeg compiled by Zeranoe was about four times slower than a version compiled by a colleague who works in an OTT organization. Since then, Miguel Perez contacted the FFmpeg organization and Zeranoe, who researched the issue, recompiled, and created a new download that resolves the problem.  To test the new …

AV1 encoding on Windows is now only 2x slower than x265. With a properly compiled version of FFmpeg, encoding performance is slightly faster than the Alliance for Open Media’s encoder, though output quality is very slightly lower. Congrats to AOM for delivering on their promise to get encoding times down. Thanks for all the help I got from multiple sources, …

AV1 encoding is now only 2x slower than x265. See the latest results here.  Though FFmpeg took 50 minutes to produce a test file that both x264 and x265 encoded in about two minutes, the Alliance for Open Media’s aomenc encoder, running the same version of AV1 (version 2) produced the file in about 15 minutes. So FFmpeg’s slow AV1 …