Adam Wieckowski

Adam Wieckowski, Christian Lehmann, Benjamin Bross et al.

Versatile Video Coding (VVC) is the most recent international video coding standard jointly developed by ITU-T and ISO/IEC, which has been finalized in July 2020. VVC allows for significant bit-rate reductions around 50% for the same subjective video quality compared to its predecessor, High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). One year after finalization, VVC support in devices and chipsets is still under development, which is aligned with the typical development cycles of new video coding standards. This paper presents open-source software packages that allow building a complete VVC end-to-end toolchain already one year after its finalization. This includes the Fraunhofer HHI VVenC library for fast and efficient VVC encoding as well as HHI's VVdeC library for live decoding. An experimental integration of VVC in the GPAC software tools and FFmpeg media framework allows packaging VVC bitstreams, e.g. encoded with VVenC, in MP4 file format and using DASH for content creation and streaming. The integration of VVdeC allows playback on the receiver. Given these packages, step-by-step tutorials are provided for two possible application scenarios: VVC file encoding plus playback and adaptive streaming with DASH.

Robert Skupin, Christian Bartnik, Adam Wieckowski et al.

The user experience in adaptive HTTP streaming relies on offering bitrate ladders with suitable operation points for all users and typically involves multiple resolutions. While open GOP coding structures are generally known to provide substantial coding efficiency benefit, their use in HTTP streaming has been precluded through lacking support of reference picture resampling (RPR) in AVC and HEVC. The newly emerging Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard supports RPR, but only conversational scenarios were primarily investigated during the design of VVC. This paper aims at enabling usage of RPR in HTTP streaming scenarios through analysing the drift potential of VVC coding tools and presenting a constrained encoding method that avoids severe drift artefacts in resolution switching with open GOP coding in VVC. In typical live streaming configurations, the presented method achieves -8.57% BD-rate reduction compared to closed GOP coding while in a typical Video on Demand configuration, -1.89% BD-rate reduction is reported. The constraints penalty compared to regular open GOP coding is 0.65% BD-rate in the worst case. The presented method was integrated into the publicly available open source VVC encoder VVenC v0.3.