Based on the new generation of international video codec standard H.266/VVC, AliYun Video Cloud recently released real-time hd encoder Ali266, which strongly promotes the landing of the application of H.266/VVC standard and truly opens the commercial road of H.266/VVC. And power ultra high definition 4K, 8K, and AR/VR applications real popularity.
Encoder Ali266 = real time + HD + super compression
Ali Cloud video cloud in July released real-time HD VVC encoder Ali266 first version, from the public information, it is currently the world’s fastest VVC encoder.
Specifically, in a 12-thread configuration, Ali266’s fast grade coding speed is 3,062 times faster than VVC standard reference software, enabling real-time coding of 720p hd on mainstream personal computers.
Based on the general test conditions officially recommended by standardization organization, Ali266 can effectively accelerate the coding speed of VVC. Its fast grade is more than 3000 times faster than the coding speed ratio of VVC standard reference software on all kinds of test video sequences.
For example, if it takes a month to transcode a movie with VVC standard reference software, it can be completed in less than 15 minutes with Ali266.
Ali266 coding speed value focus three points: greatly save VVC standard computing power, the first time to achieve hd real-time, strong push the latest coding technology landing.
The Ali266 release, not only to live audio and video, online meeting, the cloud games need real-time encoding of the existing business can use the most advanced standard of VVC, will be more clear video to millions of consumers with lower bandwidth, more important is can be a strong push AR/VR and emerging video applications such as high-definition ground application.
Similar to most commercial encoders, Ali266 can also provide different speed grades according to different application requirements. Under the same quality, Ali266 can save 35%~50% bandwidth compared with the open source H.265/HEVC encoder X265 corresponding speed grades. If the encoding performance is converted into bandwidth cost, assuming that the annual bandwidth cost of x265 encoder is 1 billion before, then using Ali266 encoder is expected to save 350 ~ 500 million bandwidth cost.
In addition to helping businesses save bandwidth and computing costs, ensuring real-time and HD experience is the key to encoder Ali266. Ali266 can deal with the global more complex network conditions, under the condition of limited network bandwidth resources, for users to bring more smooth, clearer video experience, the original weak network can only watch standard DEFINITION users, now can get hd experience.
How important is H.266/VVC to vaization?
Scenes such as following online dramas, watching blockbusters, “buying, buying” in the studio, and video conferences truly reflect that modern young people’s life and working style is inseparable from a variety of video applications. In particular, the past year has witnessed the once-in-a-century event of human beings, as well as the booming development of various video applications. The amount of video data carried by the network has therefore witnessed a larger explosive growth.
** How much video data is there? ** Take a 720p movie at 30 frames per second. If the movie is 90 minutes long, you’ll need at least 332Mbps to watch it without video compression, and 224GB to store it, which is unaffordable for any consumer.
So the video needs to be compressed and encoded before it can be transmitted and stored. This process is called video coding. In order for different video products and devices from different companies to be interconnected, video coding needs to be standardized. With the video coding standard as the specification that each manufacturer must follow, the video code stream encoded by a certain video content provider can be decoded and played on the mobile phone or TV equipment of different manufacturers.
In response to the explosive growth in the amount of video data produced by human society, video coding standards are evolving according to their own “Moore’s Law”. Every few years, itU-T and ISO/IEC MPEG, two major international video Standards organizations, join forces to introduce a new generation of video coding standards that double the compression rate of the previous generation.
Over the past 30 years, the video standards developed by the two major video standards organizations have had a profound impact on the video industry, triggering many technological changes and innovations in the video industry.
For example, the H.262/MPEG-2 standard has driven the transition from analog TV to digital TV. H.264/AVC made hd video and Internet video widely available; H.265/HEVC was successful in bringing HDR and 4K ultra HD video to the ground.
The H.266/VVC standard is the new flagship video standard jointly launched by the two standards organizations. The VVC standard was officially released in July 2020 and reduces bandwidth costs by half compared to the HEVC standard. In addition, VVC can provide better support for streaming media and real-time communication such as live broadcast, on-demand and video conference through adaptive bandwidth and resolution, improve users’ real-time HD experience, and enable emerging video applications under 5G such as AR/VR, HDR video, 360-degree panoramic video, screen content and ULTRA HD 4K, 8K and so on.
How did the first version of Ali266 come about?
Although VVC standard has strong compression efficiency, there is still a long way to promote the commercial use of VVC standard. This is because the VVC standard provides more than 30 kinds of the latest coding tools, encoders how to reasonably choose these coding tools and combinations to get the VVC high compression efficiency dividend, this puts forward a high computational power requirements for encoders.
For this reason, VVC’s reference software platform is slow to encode, not even 0.01 FPS for 720p video. Even the world’s first open source VVC encoder, although much faster than VVC reference software, can only encode 720p video at around 10 FPS.
In order to solve this technical problem, alibaba’s video team began to fully devote to the development of VVC software codec shortly after the release of the H.266/VVC standard.
On December 30, 2020, five months after the official release of the H.266/VVC standard, Alibaba released the self-developed mobile real-time decoder Ali266. Experiments have proved that Ali266 integrated live video, short video and other applications, only 2 threads can real-time smooth play 720p hd video on low-end mobile phones, greatly save computing power consumption and can benefit the mobile terminal full scene, to a large extent to verify the usefulness of VVC standard.
Upon completion of VVC decoder after the release of ali cloud video cloud immediately into the research and development of VVC encoder, can target is a research and development according to different application, provide different gear, off-line and real-time processing ability of VVC encoder, to live, a short video and online meetings, cloud games, and other fields, with better user experience.
The video standards team developed the first version of the Ali266 encoder in just six months, thanks to their deep knowledge of video coding.
On the one hand, Ali266 improves the coding quality and compression efficiency by realizing a variety of coding algorithms, such as motion compensation time domain filtering, adaptive GOP size decision, scene switching detection, screen content detection, bit rate control technology, etc. On the other hand, the development of hundreds of coding fast algorithms, as well as multithreaded technology, assembly instructions, memory access efficiency and other engineering optimization means.
Public information shows that Ali266 is the first time in the industry to achieve real-time HD VVC coding capability! The first version has achieved 35%~50% lower bandwidth cost than x265 open source encoder corresponding speed grade, while ensuring hd real-time coding speed and perfect verification of VVC powerful compression efficiency.
In July 2021, Ali266, as the first real-time HD VVC software encoder, took an important step in the industry, proving that existing computing platforms can fully enjoy the powerful compression capabilities of the latest international standard VVC. But for Aliyun’s video cloud, it has only just reached its first major milestone.
Looking ahead, the Video Cloud team will continue to promote the deep optimization of VVC encoders, making Ali266 a commercial encoder with full HD, 4K and even 8K real-time encoding capabilities, and continuously improve the compression efficiency to accelerate the commercial implementation of VVC standards. At the same time, we will continue to expand the application of artificial intelligence in video coding, so that video codec technology to a higher level.
“Video cloud Technology” is your most noteworthy audio and video technology public account. It pushes practical technical articles from ali Cloud every week, and communicates with first-class engineers in the field of audio and video. 【 Technology 】 You can join ali Cloud video cloud product technology exchange group, and the industry to discuss audio and video technology, to get more industry latest information.