x266 VVC Encoder

[birdie]

Development is already underway:

MulticoreWare announces the formation of x266 consortium and development of an open source code for VVC encoding is already underway. Similarly, MulticoreWare’s x265 consortium led the development of the open source code x265 for HEVC based encoding and become the mmost widely used HEVC encoding software.

Application areas of x266 will include encoding High Definition(HD) and Ultra High Definition(UHD- 4K and 8K) video for broadcasting, live streaming, Over The Top(OTT) video distribution, Adaptive Bit Rate(ABR) streaming, video storage and archiving, surveillance, screen content sharing, video teleconferencing, video games, eSports, immersive media such as 360-degree video, Virtual Reality (VR) etc.

x266 will be able to encode video with Standard, High Dynamic Range and Wide Color Gamut. It will also offer a user flexibility to trade-off speed of encoding with coding efficiency. Initial version of the x266 software will support single layer coding of 10 bits video with 4:2:0 chroma format. More advanced versions will support multilayer coding, higher than 10 bits depth video and higher than 4:2:0 chroma formats.

[FranceBB]

Great news!!

[microchip8]

Awesome!

[Greenhorn]

Hopefully, this will get off to a good start; the availability of a genuinely good encoder seems like it'll be critical for VVC.

[ksec]

Hopefully x265 and x266 being developed by the same team would speed things up a little bit.

What that means is that we could see EVC, VVC and AV2 Encoder all appearing within a year.

[hajj_3]

Originally Posted by ksec

What that means is that we could see EVC, VVC and AV2 Encoder all appearing within a year.

AV2? That would be a bad idea as it would make it less likely for AV1 to receive mass adoption. They should wait 2.5yrs more to ratify AV2.

Also lots of patents will have expired over 5yrs since AV1 was ratified it they wait.

[ksec]

Originally Posted by hajj_3

AV2? That would be a bad idea as it would make it less likely for AV1 to receive mass adoption. They should wait 2.5yrs more to ratify AV2.

Also lots of patents will have expired over 5yrs since AV1 was ratified it they wait.

Yes..... and the originally schedule for AV2 is 2020. And AV1 was suppose to be 2017....

They sure should take their time to ratify, but who knows.

[FranceBB]

Originally Posted by ksec

Hopefully x265 and x266 being developed by the same team would speed things up a little bit.

Yep, that's the idea.
I really hope it will be ready for 2021. That would be great.

(On the other hand, it would mean that now I don't have any excuses not to buy a new CPU...)

Speaking of new hardware, what about decoding support? Is there anything in program? Like new gen GPUs?

[hajj_3]

Originally Posted by FranceBB

(On the other hand, it would mean that now I don't have any excuses not to buy a new CPU...)

Now is a bad time to buy a new cpu. AMD's zen 3 cpu's are going to be released soon, i'd wait until then before buying.

Originally Posted by FranceBB

Speaking of new hardware, what about decoding support? Is there anything in program? Like new gen GPUs?

VVC was only ratified recently, it will likely take 1.5-2.5yrs for hardware decoders to ship in apu's or gpu's. So not likely until 2022.

[soresu]

Originally Posted by ksec

Hopefully x265 and x266 being developed by the same team would speed things up a little bit.

What that means is that we could see EVC, VVC and AV2 Encoder all appearing within a year.

AV2 is in deep dev mode at the moment but nowhere near finished at this point from what I gather from the commits on the AOM experimental branch.

I'd be surprised if we saw it even in 2022, more likely 2023 at the earliest?

[birdie]

To be honest I'm a lot more excited by VVC than AV1. The former looks like a codec which will be embraced by the scene and which will be viable for end users. AV1 is so computationally expensive it's suitable only for Google with their insane compute resources. SVT-AV1 is fast and ... blurry at all presets. Of course, patents and everything, only it doesn't matter for your personal archival purposes.

Also, AV1/H.265/VP9 basically offer nothing/very little vs. H.264 in terms of transparent near-lossless compression where H.264 is still the king. I wonder if H.266 could change that.

[soresu]

Originally Posted by birdie

To be honest I'm a lot more excited by VVC than AV1. The former looks like a codec which will be embraced by the scene and which will be viable for end users. AV1 is so computationally expensive it's suitable only for Google with their insane compute resources. SVT-AV1 is fast and ... blurry at all presets. Of course, patents and everything, only it doesn't matter for your personal archival purposes.

Also, AV1/H.265/VP9 basically offer nothing/very little vs. H.264 in terms of transparent near-lossless compression where H.264 is still the king. I wonder if H.266 could change that.

From what I gather on the AV1 discord libaom has come on in leaps and bounds in both speed and memory consumption since SVT AV1 came out guns blazing on the speed front.

As for near lossless compression - I don't think that this is an aspect of the codec standard so much as the implementation.

x264 had an insane level of focus on replacing XviD at all levels, and it did eventually do that by about 2010/11 timeframe from what I remember - I think that this focus was the real reason that x264 is still the high bitrate king of the OSS encoders.

I've seen benchmarks that show x265 isn't even the best H265/HEVC encoder out there (HW265 was it?), so it seems there is definitely room for improvement.

II think that the rav1e people are focused on being a true open source x264 successor in terms of quality in their endgame, although it will probably take until well past the release of AV2 to reach that goal.

[tnti]

Hope that there is something new in the rate control algorithm of X266.

[benwaggoner]

Originally Posted by tnti

Hope that there is something new in the rate control algorithm of X266.

Like what?

[tnti]

Originally Posted by benwaggoner

Like what?

You should understand Alibaba's S265 encoder.

[benwaggoner]

Originally Posted by tnti

You should understand Alibaba's S265 encoder.

What about it? Is there a particular rate control feature you'd like to see adopted elsewhere? If so, can you provide details?

[tnti]

Originally Posted by benwaggoner

What about it? Is there a particular rate control feature you'd like to see adopted elsewhere? If so, can you provide details?

https://www.livevideostack.cn/news/t...-h265-cdn-rtc/
Sorry, there is no English version of the PPT.

[Cary Knoop]

Is VCC specced to support floating point code values?

[quietvoid]

Does anyone have more info about this repo here: https://github.com/chenm001/x266
Looks like just a research implementation but curious.

[FranceBB]

Originally Posted by quietvoid

Does anyone have more info about this repo here: https://github.com/chenm001/x266
Looks like just a research implementation but curious.

The last release says "on Oct 21, 2017" when the standard wasn't even remotely a thing and was so far away from being finalized. I don't think it's something official nor from Multicoreware...