HEVC video encoding environment


The HEVC Test Model (HM) reference software by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group and ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group is the Holy Grail of HEVC encoders in terms of video quality and bandwidth. Hosted by the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI) the HEVC Test Model is the reference in bitstream compatibility and encoding quality. In practical applications such as real-time HEVC encoding, however, the Test Model may not be suitable.

For reference purpose the libde265 team encodes various videos with the HM Reference Encoder. The encoding environment is a small cluster which nicely suits the requirements. The cluster is normally used for performance measurements and load-balancing verification of the company online meeting and telephone conferencing systems. The technical specifications of the deployed encoding environment are:

  • 9 x Intel Core i7 3770K 3.50 GHz
  • 288 GByte DDR3-1600 RAM
  • 889 Whetstone GFLOPS
  • 1,165 Dhrystone GIPS

The computational complexity of motion picture encoding in general depend on the quality (PSNR) to bandwidth ratio. Typically, as higher the quality to bandwidth ratio will get as more computational effort it will be needed for the encoding. One goal of libde265 HEVC is bringing closer together the contrary requirements of quality, bandwidth and computational complexity. Further information and HEVC test streams are going to be published with one of the the upcoming libde265 HEVC releases.

 References: