While many AI-based codecs are still making their first appearance in white papers, often with tortured playback requirements and no working decoder, the Deep Render codec is already encoding in FFmpeg, playing in VLC, and running on the billions of NPU-enabled devices already in the market. Let’s take a step back. I’ve been following the development of the Deep Render …

If you’re optimizing x265 for speed, enabling Wavefront Parallel Processing (WPP) looks like a no-brainer. Table 1 shows a staggering 7.3x improvement in encoding time. A 3:15 encode with WPP turns into a painful 23:51 without it. The quality penalty? Negligible. VMAF drops just 0.19, with the low-frame VMAF off by only 0.77  (low-frame is the lowest VMAF score of …

Background Authors & Affiliations: Zhaoyang Jia and Linfeng Qi (USTC), Bin Li, Jiahao Li, Wenxuan Xie, Houqiang Li, and Yan Lu (Microsoft Research Asia). This project stems from an open-source effort initiated in late 2023, with code available on GitHub. The paper targets a long-standing obstacle for neural video codecs (NVCs): achieving real-time performance without sacrificing compression quality. Existing approaches …