A VVC/H.266 Real-time
Software Encoder for UHD
Live Video Applications
Spin Digital | Whitepaper | February 16th 2023 | Version 2.0

Spin Digital Video Technologies GmbH
Helmholtzstraße 2-9. 10587 Berlin, Germany
www.spin-digital.com | info@spin-digital.com

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. SUMMARY

3

2. INTRODUCTION: TRENDS IN LIVE MEDIA APPLICATIONS

4

3. THE VVC/H.266 STANDARD AND ITS APPLICATIONS

5

3.1. VVC TARGET APPLICATIONS

5

3.2. VVC ENCODERS: LIVE VS VOD

5

4. SPIN DIGITAL’S VVC REAL-TIME ENCODER

7

5. ENCODER ASSESSMENT FOR 4K-UHD STREAMING AND BROADCASTING

8

5.1. VIDEO SEQUENCES

8

5.2. VIDEO ENCODERS

10

5.3. ENCODING SETTINGS

11

5.4. COMPARISON METRICS

12

5.5. COMPRESSION EFFICIENCY AND ENCODING COMPLEXITY

13

5.6. COMPRESSION EFFICIENCY PER SEQUENCE

17

5.7. SELECTED QUALITY-BITRATE PLOTS

18

5.8. MULTITHREADED ENCODING SPEED

21

6. ENCODER ASSESSMENT FOR 8K-UHD BROADCASTING AND STREAMING

22

6.1. TEST CONDITIONS

23

6.2. COMPRESSION EFFICIENCY AND ENCODING COMPLEXITY

24

6.3. COMPRESSION EFFICIENCY PER SEQUENCE

27

6.4. MULTITHREADED ENCODING SPEED

28

7. 4K/8K VVC LIVE STREAMING AND BROADCASTING

29

8. CONCLUSIONS

32

REFERENCES

34

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SUMMARY

Versatile Video Coding (VVC) is the newest video coding standard designed tosignificantly reduce the bitrate over its predecessor, High Efficiency Video Coding(HEVC), as well as to facilitate next-generation video applications.
Spin Digital has succeeded in developing a VVC real-time software encoder for Ultra HD(4K and 8K) live streaming and broadcasting. The version achieves, for 4K video, a 18%
bitrate savings at equal quality compared to Spin Digital’s HEVC real-time encoder, anindustry-leading encoder for its high performance and compression efficiency. In thecase of 8K video, the average bitrate reduction amounts to 27%.
As a result of extensive algorithmic and platform-related optimizations, the VVC
encoder can process 4Kp60 and 8Kp30 10-bit HDR videos in real-time using a single
server with a dual-socket CPU architecture. In the near future, through the use ofadvanced encoding algorithms and next-generation CPU architectures, new releases ofthe encoder will enable real-time 8Kp60 10-bit HDR encoding and higher compression
efficiency.
Spin Digital’s VVC encoder has been integrated into a live streaming framework that
includes all the required components for live applications such as: input capture (SDIand IP), pre-processing filters, pre-analysis, advanced rate control, audio and video
encoding, and HTTP and TS-over-IP streaming and broadcasting.
This document describes the implementation of the encoder and presents anevaluation of its compression efficiency and performance for 4K- and 8K-UHD live
streaming applications. The encoder is evaluated with other software and hardware(GPU-based) encoders for UHD live applications. Results show that the new encoder
achieves higher compression efficiency than other encoders while at the same time
has the required performance for UHD real-time encoding.

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INTRODUCTION: TRENDS IN LIVE MEDIA APPLICATIONSIn the first half of 2022, video traffic accounted for about 66% of the total share ofInternet data traffic, which is a 24% increase over the first half of 2021 (Sandvine 2023).
And nearly 20% of Internet video traffic is already live (Cisco 2018) (SkyQuest 2022).
OTT live and on-demand services are becoming increasingly popular, forcing traditional
TV broadcasters to also use the open Internet to boost viewership (Careless 2021)(SES 2022). In addition to professional created content, User-Generated Content (UGC)
is being live-streamed on platforms such as YouTube and Facebook, generating
significantly higher engagement rates (Bern 2019). Apart from TV and live video
streaming, other live applications include gaming, video conferencing, virtual desktop,
and video social networking. The Covid-19 pandemic has also changed the way inwhich people are interacting in private and professional life: there are more and more
video conferencing sessions as well as more live events online. And these trends do
not seem to change in the post-pandemic scenario (Wyman 2021).
The next generation of live applications is primarily focused on delivering higher quality
video as well as immersive experiences that engage the end user more with thecontent. The 4K Ultra-High Definition (UHD) High Dynamic Range (HDR) format is
becoming mainstream, 8K-UHD streaming and broadcasting is already a reality, 8K
360-/180-degree video is an accepted format for high-end live Virtual Reality (VR)streaming applications, and gaming sharing and virtual desktop applications are
increasingly using UHD video resolutions
For these emerging live services, High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) represents thestate-of-the-art codec for compressing video with lower data rates without sacrificing
quality (Spin Digital 2020, Ultra HD Forum 2021). However, HEVC is reaching its
maximum compression efficiency capacity. As a result, next-generation codecs areneeded to make these enhanced applications more accessible.
Versatile Video Coding (VVC), or H.266, is the latest video coding standard that not only
provides significantly higher compression efficiency than HEVC, but is also designed toenable efficient coding of different types of video, such as UHDTV (4K and 8K),
VR/360-degree, and screen content. VVC also includes tools for more efficientencoding for adaptive bitrate streaming and scalable encoding. VVC coding solutions,especially for live streaming and broadcasting, will be essential in the near future tofacilitate the development of next-generation multimedia applications.

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THE VVC/H.266 STANDARD AND ITS APPLICATIONSThe VVC/H.266 standard was completed in July 2020 by the Joint Video Experts Team(JVET) of ISO and ITU (Bross et al. 2020). VVC represents the state-of-the-art in videocoding providing 50% bitrate reduction with respect to its predecessor, HEVC/H.265, forthe same visual quality. This level of compression gain is only possible at the expenseof significant computational increase.
In the currently fragmented codec landscape, VVC competes with other coding
standards including AV1 by the Alliance for Open Media (AOM), Low Complexity
Enhancement Video Coding (LCEVC) and Essential Video Coding (EVC) by MPEG.
Independent evaluations have shown that VVC can achieve higher compression
efficiency than these other standards: e.g. 19.5% to 20.5% better than AV1 and 27.3% to30.5% better than EVC for UHD video (Grois et al. 2021).

3.1.

VVC TARGET APPLICATIONSVVC not only produces higher compression than other standards, but is also designed
to achieve more efficient coding of different types of content: including 2D regularcamera content, screen content, and 360-degree video, and new-generation video
formats including 4K- and 8K-UHD with HDR and VR/360°.

In addition, VVC includes new features to make Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) streaming
services more efficient, as well as adding support for scalability coding scalability, acoding technique to compress video in multiple layers, each layer representing a
different resolution or quality of the same video.

3.2.

VVC ENCODERS: LIVE VS VODHEVC implementations already achieve the performance required to transmit 4K and
8K video live over the Internet as well as broadcast channels. Using latest-generation
HEVC real-time encoders, the typical bitrates to produce broadcast-grade quality 4Kp60
video range from 10 to 40 Mbps (Ultra HD Forum 2022) and for 8Kp60 from 48 to 80
Mbps (Schwarz 2 2022). However, these encoding solutions have reached a point ofdiminishing returns for HEVC under real-time conditions, meaning that adding morecomputation will result in marginal compression gains.
In order to reduce the bandwidth beyond the capabilities of HEVC and, in this way, make
UHD live services more accessible to the public, new-generation codecs are needed.
Figure 1 shows a comparison of state-of-the-art performance optimised encoding

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implementations of AVC, HEVC, AV1, and VVC for 4K-UHD video in terms ofcompression efficiency and encoding complexity. Compression efficiency is measured
as bitrate increase at equal quality referred to a baseline encoder, and encoding
complexity is calculated as CPU utilisation time relative to that of a baseline encoder
based on HEVC with a configuration that represents the best operational point for
real-time applications.

Figure 1: Video codecs (AVC, HEVC, AV1, and VVC) compression efficiency capabilities andencoding complexity. When a video codec reaches a point of diminishing returns the next
generation codec offers the path for further compression gains.

The figure illustrates how the baseline HEVC encoder is able to process 4Kp60 video inreal time, and with the same computational complexity has a much higher compression
efficiency than AVC/H.264.
Beyond a relative complexity of 1.5x HEVC and AVC are no longer able to significantly
increase compression efficiency. In contrast, AV1 and especially VVC implementations
are able to significantly overcome the compression limits of HEVC at very highcomplexity. Finally, from a complexity higher than 25.0x, it is observed that VVC
increases its compression efficiency advantage compared to AV1.
But not all quality-compression configurations are possible for real-time encoding. We
suggest that the sweet spot is located between 1x to 2.5x the complexity of thebaseline HEVC encoder. Beyond that point the encoders can be used for offline
encoding applications such as Video-on-Demand (VoD). Figure 1 shows that an
optimised VVC encoder is able to achieve up to 50% bitrate reduction compared to thebaseline HEVC live encoder, but at the cost of 50 times the computational complexity.

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SPIN DIGITAL’S VVC REAL-TIME ENCODER

Spin Digital has developed the first version of a high-quality and highly optimised VVC
software encoder for UHD HDR live broadcast and streaming.
The encoder has been extensively optimised using:-

Advanced mode and partitioning decision algorithms aimed at improving
compression efficiency while reducing VVC encoding complexity.
SIMD processing using AVX2 and AVX-512 instructions.
Scalable multithreading exploiting different levels of parallelism (wavefront,,
frame, pipelining) for systems with hundreds of CPU cores.

With all these optimizations together, the new encoder enables real-time encoding of
4K at 60 fps and 8K at 30 fps video in 10-bit HDR using a dual-socket server with a totalof 76 CPU cores.

Figure 2: Key components of Spin Digital’s VVC live encoder diagram

In order to obtain higher compression efficiency than HEVC with an affordable increasein CPU resources, VVC coding tools were analysed, selected and implemented
according to their potential for compression, quality and real-time implementation. Spin
Digital’s VVC encoder includes major VVC tools such as enhanced block partitioning,
new intra-prediction modes and tools, extended motion vector prediction andinter-prediction tools, large block-size transforms and better entropy coding, as well as
deblocking, SAO and ALF in-loop filters.
In addition to the VVC standard tools, the encoder includes advanced rate control
algorithms (VBR, and CBR with HRD model), pre-analysis, and perceptually optimised
encoding.

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The VVC encoder has been integrated into a complete application for live streaming
and broadcasting (see Figure 2), and it is also available as a SDK module and as a
FFmpeg plugin.
The application and SDK include and combine all the modules required for live
streaming including: input capture with both SDI and IP interfaces, pre-processing(scaling, colour conversion, tone mapping), advanced rate control, core VVC (andHEVC) encoding, audio encoding (MPEG-H Audio, AAC), and streaming for HTTP (HLS,
DASH) or Transport Stream over IP (TS-over-IP) delivery (UDP, RTP, SRT, RIST, Zixi).

5.

ENCODER ASSESSMENT FOR 4K-UHD STREAMING AND
BROADCASTING

The new Spin Digital VVC real-time encoder was assessed in terms of compression
efficiency, encoding complexity, and multithreaded encoding speed. The results werealso compared to five open-source software encoders and two GPU-based hardware
encoders of different coding standards including H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, AV1, and
VVC/H.266.
The encoders were configured assuming a 4K-UHD live streaming and broadcasting
scenario. This use case mainly requires that the rate control is enabled and that longGroup-of-Picture (GOP) structures are used for maximum compression efficiency withfrequent random access points (e.g. 1 to 3 seconds intra period).
A wide set of test video sequences have been selected that are representative of
4K-UHDTV content as well as long enough to stabilise the rate control.

5.1.

VIDEO SEQUENCES

A total of 11 1-minute 4K video sequences representing the target use case wereselected in these experiments (see Table 1). The test set includes camera footage,
animation and videos with visual effects.
The video sequences were acquired from different providers including: Netflix (Xiph2015, Netflix 2022), Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center (PSNC)(Immersify 2018), Fraunhofer HHI (Fraunhofer HHIl 2022), and Unigine (Unigine 2017).
The master files were preprocessed using Spin Digital’s high-precision filters togenerate a 4K-UHD broadcast distribution format, which is specified in Table 1.
A detailed description of the input sequences including the preprocessing operations
applied to each sequence are described in a separated Annex ”Technical Data Sheet of
the Test Video Sequences”.

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Table 1: Technical specifications of the 4K-UHD distribution format
Parameters

4K-UHD distribution format

Resolution

3840x2160 pixels

Frame rate

24, 59.94, 60 fps

Chroma sampling

4:2:0

Bit-depth

10 bits

Transfer function and colour gamut

SDR: SDR, BT.709
HDR: PQ, BT.2020

Table 2 presents detailed information of the test sequences: producer, type of content,
HDR and colour gamut formats, and Spatial Information (SI) and Temporal Information(TI) (ITU-R 2019). The obtained SI and TI values cover a wide spectrum of complexities,
from low (Meridian, RollerCoaster) to high (SolLevante, TunnelFlag) SI and TI,
demonstrating the heterogeneity in complexity of the selected sequences (Figure 3).
More technical information about these videos is given in a separated appendix.

Table 2: Technical information of the test sequences: producer, type of content, format, SI, TI
ProducerBasketballGame

Netflix

Type

FormatSI

TI

Footage 4Kp59.94 HDR

112.6 (med)152.2 (med)Footage

4Kp60 HDR

172.2 (med)63.6 (low)BerlinSeqs

Fraunh. HHI

DrivingPOV

Netflix

Footage 4Kp59.94 HDR

150.0 (med)147.4 (med)FollowCar

PSNC

Footage 4Kp59.94 SDR

201.9 (high)111.8 (med)

MC2

PSNC

Footage 4Kp59.94 SDR

280.5 (high)82.5 (low)Meridian

Netflix Footage & CGI 4Kp59.94 HDR

89.8 (low)23.6 (low)RollerCoaster

Netflix

92.3 (low)84.9 (low)SolLevante

Netflix

Animation

4Kp24 HDR

237.5 (high)269.4 (high)Superposition

UnigineCGI

4Kp60 SDR

226.5 (high)82.9 (low)ToddlerFountain

Netflix

Footage 4Kp59.94 HDR

170.2 (med)79.3 (low)TunnelFlag

Netflix

Footage 4Kp59.94 SDR

211.6 (high)

206.8 (high)Footage 4Kp59.94 HDR

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Figure 3: Spatial and Temporal Perceptual Information of the test sequences

5.2.

VIDEO ENCODERS

Spin Digital’s VVC encoder has been analysed together with other 8 encoders including
open-source software and GPU-based (hardware encoders) covering a wide range of
implementations and video coding standards from H.264/AVC to H.266/VVC.
The evaluated encoders are: one software AVC/H.264 encoder (x264); three HEVC
software implementations (x265, SVT-HEVC, Spin Digital HEVC) and one GPU-based
HEVC encoder (NVENC-HEVC); two AV1 encoders, one software-based (SVT-AV1) and
one GPU-based (OneVPL-AV1); and two VVC software encoders (VVenC, Spin Digital
VVC). A summary is presented in Table 3.
Spin Digital’s HEVC and VVC encoders are part of a commercially available productcalled Spin Enc Live (Spin Digital 2022, Spin Digital 2023). For the sake of clarity, fromnow on these encoders will be called Spin Digital HEVC and Spin Digital VVC
respectively.

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Table 3: Encoders used for 4K compression efficiency and performance analysis
TypeStandard

Company

VersionReleasedate

Reference/
repository

x264

SW

AVC

VideoLAN

r3094

Apr. 2022(FFmpeg 2022)

x265

SW

HEVC

Multicore
Ware

3.5

Apr. 2022(FFmpeg 2022)

SVT-HEVC

SW

HEVC

Intel

1.5.1

June 2021(Intel 2022)

NVENC-HEVC

HW

HEVC

Nvidia12.0

Nov. 2022(Nvidia 2022)

Spin Digital HEVC

SW

HEVC

Spin Digital

2.0

Jan. 2023(Spin Digital 2023)

SVT-AV1SW

AV1 Intel & Netflix

1.4.1

Dec. 2022(Intel, Netflix 2022)

OneVPL-AV1

HW

AV1

Intel

2.8

Nov. 2022(Intel 2 2022)

VVenC

SW

VVC

Fraunhofer
HHI

1.7.0

Dec. 2022(A. Wieck. 2022)

Spin Digital VVC

SW

VVC

Spin Digital

2.0

Feb. 2023(Spin Digital 2023)

5.3.

ENCODING SETTINGS

The video encoders were configured as similarly as possible assuming the 4K-UHD
streaming and broadcast scenario. This use case typically requires random-accessencoding mode (long GOP), open GOP, 1-second intra period, and Constant Bit Rate
(CBR) rate control with a 1-second buffer size for the Hypothetical Reference Decoder(HRD) model. Some exceptions to this typical configuration are:●●

The Variable Bit Rate (VBR) algorithm of SVT-AV1 was selected, since the CBR
method is not supported in random-access mode;
VBR was also selected in VVenC and, in addition, a buffer model is not included
as VVenC does not support the HRD constraint.

In addition, the encoders were tuned to maximise the objective quality defined by thePeak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) metric and, consequently, perceptual optimizations
were disabled. Other parameters, such as GOP size, GOP structure, and lookaheadwindow were kept at their default values.
The target bitrates were selected based on the recommendations given by the Ultra HD
Forum for 4K HEVC final distribution (Ultra HD Forum 2021). In particular, forcompression efficiency (BD-rate) analysis a range between 8 and 44 Mbps in steps of 4
Mbps was used. This range is wide enough to accurately compare different generationsof encoders.

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For each encoder several presets were selected in order to analyse different tradeoffs
between quality and speed. As for NVENC-HEVC, this encoder includes, along with theencoding presets, the following tuning modes: high-quality (hq), low-latency (ll), andultra low-latency (ull). In these experiments the high-quality mode was chosen.

5.4.

COMPARISON METRICS

The video encoders were compared from the compression efficiency, encoding
complexity, and performance points of view using BD-rate, CPU time and the encoding
speed in frames per second, respectively.
Compression efficiency: BD-rate
The Bjontegaard Delta (BD)-rate method (Bjøntegaard 2001, Bjøntegaard 2008) wasused to compute compression efficiency. Its goal is to compute the average bitrateincrease produced by a test encoder referred to a baseline encoder at the same quality
Spin Digital’s HEVC real-time encoder - Spin Digital HEVC - was selected as the baseline
encoder. Four quality metrics used in the experiments were: PSNR, Perceptually
Weighted PSNR (XPSNR) (Helmrich et al. 2020, Helmrich 2021), Multi-Scale Structural
Similarity (MS-SSIM) (Wang, Simoncelli, and Bovik 2003), and Video Multi-method
Assessment Function (VMAF) (Netflix 2021). The PSNR, XPSNR, and MS-SSIM metrics
were calculated using the luma and chroma components.
Encoding complexity: CPU time
Encoding complexity was measured in terms of average CPU time (including bothuser-level and system-level CPU time) over the target bitrates during the encoding
process, relative to a reference encoder (Spin Digital HEVC). Note that the CPU time isthe accumulated time across all CPU cores, and can therefore be considered as
single-threaded encoding time. This metric is only applicable to software encoders.
The platform used to run the encodings and quality metrics for BD-rate and CPU timecomputation is a server with the following components:
●
●
●

CPU:
DRAM:
OS:

4x Intel Xeon Platinum 8176 CPU @ 2.10GHz (4x 28 cores)
24x 16 GB DDR4 2666 MHz
Ubuntu 20.04

Encoding jobs were executed in parallel using the parallel job scheduling framework
called parallel (Tange 2018). For the sake of a fair comparison, the number of encoding
threads was set to 8 in the software encoders. An analysis of maximum encoding
speed when using a high-performance multi-core CPU is described next.

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Performance: average multithreaded encoding speed
The performance of the encoders was measured in terms of average multithreaded
encoding speed. This measurement allowed us to determine the number of frames per
second produced by the encoders running on a latest-generation multi-core platform
when enabling the maximum encoding threads.
The average encoding speed provided by the encoding applications was taken insteadof using the elapsed time facilitated by the Linux time command, as the former
measures the performance devoted to encoding only, excluding the time consumed formemory allocation and other initialization steps at the beginning of the encoding.
The server specifications used to measure the speed performance of the encoders arelisted below:
●
●
●
●

CPU:
GPUs:
DRAM:
OS:

5.5.

Intel Xeon Platinum 8368@ 2.4 GHz (2x 38 cores)
Nvidia RTX 3070, Intel ARC A770
16x 16 GB DDR4 3200 MHz
Red Hat 8.5

COMPRESSION EFFICIENCY AND ENCODING COMPLEXITY

The compression efficiency and encoding complexity of the new Spin Digital VVC
encoder together with all the evaluated encoders is presented in Figures 4, 5, 6, and 7
for PSNR, XPSNR, MS-SSIM, and VMAF metrics respectively.
The reference encoder is Spin Digital HEVC - balanced, where balanced is the presetthat obtains the best tradeoff between compression efficiency and complexity for 4K.
For comparison purposes with the software encoders, the BD-rate results for the
hardware encoders are plotted on the left side of the figures without CPU time
information, since CPU time cannot be calculated in hardware encoders.
For the case of Spin Digital VVC - balanced, where the balanced preset represents agood compromise between compression efficiency and complexity for 4K video, theobtained BD-rate savings over Spin Digital HEVC - balanced ranges from 16.18% to17.54% depending on the quality metric used, while requiring 65% more CPU resources.

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Figure 4: PSNR BD-Rate and CPU utilisation time for 4K video relative to Spin Digital HEVC forthe encoders and presets under evaluation

When compared to an optimised HEVC encoder, Spin Digital’s
VVC encoder yields a BD-rate savings from 16.18% (MS-SSIM)
to 17.54% (VMAF) at 1.65 times the computational complexity.

Figure 5: XPSNR BD-Rate and CPU utilisation time for 4K video relative to Spin Digital HEVC forthe encoders and presets under evaluation

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Figure 6: MS-SSIM BD-Rate and CPU utilisation time for 4K video relative to Spin Digital HEVC
for the encoders and presets under evaluation

At similar compression efficiency, Spin Digital VVC is 50% lesscomplex than SVT-AV1 (7) and significantly less complex thanx265 (slower).

Figure 7: VMAF BD-Rate and CPU utilisation time for 4K video relative to Spin Digital HEVC forthe encoders and presets under evaluation

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When assuming comparable complexity, Spin Digital VVC - balanced achieves higher
BD-rate gains than SVT-AV1 - 9, for example: -16.53% vs 3.39% (PSNR) or -17.54% vs11.32% (VMAF).
Moreover, it is observed that the BD-rate reduction achieved by Spin Digital VVC balanced is comparable to those of SVT-AV1 - 7 and x265 - slower, but those encoding
modes require 2.0 times and 13.4 times more computation, respectively.
It can also be seen that Spin Digital’s encoders outperforms in compression efficiency
the GPU-based hardware encoders. For example, the NVENC-HEVC - 5 and OneVPL-AV1- 4 encoders which, as we will show later have the required performance for real-time
4Kp60, result in BD-rate increases between 17% to 23% relative to Spin Digital HEVC balanced, and between 40% and 45% with respect to Spin Digital VVC - balanced.

The GPU-based hardware encoders produce, for 4K video,
BD-rate increase of up to 45% with respect to Spin Digital VVC.

Table 4 reports the results in terms of BD-rate and CPU time for a narrower range ofbitrates between 6 Mbps and 25 Mbps, which can be considered more realistic for 4K
VVC or AV1 video. For the sake of simplicity, the results correspond to Spin Digital’s
HEVC and VVC encoders, SVT-AV1 - 9, and VVenC - faster.

Table 4: Results for 4K video in terms of BD-rate based on different quality metrics (PSNR,XPSNR, MS-SSIM, VMAF) and CPU time relative to Spin Digital HEVC for selected encoders andpresets under evaluation. The bitrate range for BD-rate calculation is 6 Mbps to 25 Mbps
Encoder - preset

PSNR
BD-rate [%]XPSNRBD-rate [%]MS-SSIM
BD-rate [%]VMAF
BD-rate [%]CPU Time[times]SVT-AV1 v1.4.1 - 9

-0.02

-2.01

-2.66

6.20

1.43

VVenC v1.7.0 - faster-32.22-36.89-35.43-29.507.72

Spin Digital HEVC v2.0 - bal

0.00

0.00

0.00

0.00

1.00

Spin Digital VVC v2.0 - bal-16.32-16.64-16.51-16.201.53

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As can be seen, the results for Spin Digital VVC - balanced, when using a range
between 6 Mbps and 25 Mbps are similar to the results obtained using a larger range ofbitrates (8 Mbps to 44 Mbps), which was needed for comparing multiple codec
generations.

5.6.

COMPRESSION EFFICIENCY PER SEQUENCE

Table 5 provides more detailed information about the BD-rate savings obtained by the
new VVC encoder when compared to the HEVC baseline. According to these results,
Spin Digital’s VVC encoder achieves, with its balanced preset, an average bitrate
reduction of 16.53% for the same PSNR, ranging from 11.88% to 26.89%, at theexpense of 1.65 times the complexity of Spin Digital HEVC - balanced. If the VMAF
metric is used, the VVC encoder achieves a 17.54% BD-rate reduction, going from
8.57% to 30.44%. When using other metrics, the encoder exhibits similar compression
gains.

Table 5: BD-rate results for each 4K video sequence achieved by Spin Digital VVC - balanced
referred to Spin Digital HEVC - balanced
Video Sequence

PSNR
BD-rate [%]XPSNRBD-rate [%]MS-SSIM
BD-rate [%]VMAF
BD-rate [%]BasketballGame-16.02-16.52-14.23-15.91

BerlinSeqs-11.88-12.14-10.23-15.72

DrivingPOV-17.89-18.60-17.43-18.70

FollowCar-26.89-26.86-26.71-24.06MC2-11.94-13.00-10.50-11.75Meridian-12.42-13.36-11.13-18.08RollerCoaster-16.92-17.51-15.49-16.86

SolLevante-13.31-14.52-14.93-13.84

Superposition-18.84-18.73-18.17-30.44

ToddlerFountain-12.51-12.39-13.71-8.57

TunnelFlag-21.76-21.27-23.69-16.82Average-16.53-16.92-16.18-17.54High-performance Video Codecs

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SELECTED QUALITY-BITRATE PLOTS

Unlike the BD-rate metric, which gives a single number representing the compression
efficiency of an encoder in average over a range of bitrates, the quality-bitrate(rate-distortion) curves provide a better insight of the compression efficiency of theencoders for individual test sequences.
The following figures show the quality-bitrate curves based on PSNR, XPSNR, MS-SSIM,
and VMAF for DrivingPOV, which is a representative sequence from the compression
efficiency point of view. In order to reduce the number of encoders and presets
displayed, only those that produce comparable complexities around 2.0x (from 1.0x to
3.0x) were included: x264 - medium, x265 - medium, SVT-HEVC - 5, SVT-AV1 - 9, Spin
Digital HEVC - balanced (our reference), and Spin Digital VVC - balanced. Although
VVenC has no preset falling in the specified range of complexity, VVenC - faster has
also been included as a reference of VVC’s potential in terms of compression
efficiency. As for the hardware encoders, the presets that produce the highest quality
were selected.
As can be observed, VVenC - faster achieves in general the highest quality at equal
bitrate –but at the cost of 8.4x the complexity– followed by Spin Digital VVC and thenby SVT-AV1 - 9.

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Figure 8: PSNR-bitrate curves for DrivingPOV

Figure 9: XPSNR-bitrate curves for DrivingPOV

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Figure 10: MS-SSIM-bitrate curves for DrivingPOV

Figure 11: VMAF-bitrate curves for DrivingPOV

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MULTITHREADED ENCODING SPEED

The performance of the encoders is measured on a server with two Intel Xeon Platinum
8368 CPUs (2x 38 cores) for the CPU-based software encoders, and two GPUs: Nvidia
RTX3070 and Intel ARC A770 for the GPU-based hardware encoders. DrivingPOV wasused in these experiments, being one of the most difficult sequences in the test set
from an encoding speed point of view.
The criterion chosen to configure the encoders for performance tests was to select thebitrate such that all of them result in the same quality. A target PSNR of 41.5 dB waschosen to produce a very high quality that in turn results in a sufficiently high bitrate forbenchmark purposes.
The software encoders were configured to enable the maximum number of threads forthe target server. For the sake of a fair performance comparison, the hardware
encoders were integrated into Spin Digital’s encoding framework which is optimised forlive applications. In order to reduce the impact of uncompressed input YUV file disk
reading and output bitstream writing, the encoders were configured to use fast file readmodes or encoding from memory and not to write the resulting bitstreams to the disk.
Figure 12 shows the encoding speed results for the bitrate required to obtain the same
quality.

Figure 12: Actual bitrate for a PSNR of 41.5 dB and encoding speed produced by the encoders
and presets when encoding DrivingPOV (4K 10-bit HDR) using two Intel Xeon Platinum 8368
CPUs (2x 38 cores), the RTX3070 GPU for NVENC, and the ARC A770 GPU for OneVPL

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According to the results shown in Figure 12, both the VVC and HEVC real-time encoders
developed by Spin Digital are able to attain average encoding speeds beyond real-time(60 fps), while producing the lowest bitrates under real-time conditions. These VVC andHEVC encoders operate, respectively, at 95.49 fps and 163.11 fps obtaining output
bitrates of 13.66 Mbps and 16.75 Mbps for the same target quality.
With the exception of VVenC, which is not designed for live applications, the otherencoders require fast presets to reach a performance comparable to Spin Digital VVC
at its balanced preset, but at the cost of increasing the rate to achieve the same quality.
For example, SVT-HEVC - 5, SVT-AV1 - 10, NVENC-HEVC - 5, and OneVPL-AV1 - 4
produce, respectively, 33.8% (18.28 Mbps), 35.4% (18.50 Mbps), 45.6% (19.89 Mbps),
and 43.6% (19.61 Mbps) more bitrate Spin Digital VVC.

Spin Digital’s VVC encoder achieves for 4K an average encoding
speed beyond 60 fps (95.5 fps) while producing the lowest
bitrate of all evaluated encoders under real-time conditions.

It is also noteworthy that the complexity when running at maximum speed in a
multicore system is very different from the single-threaded complexity reported in
Figure 4. In particular, it can be noticed that the parallel processing performance ofSpin Digital VVC is more scalable than that of SVT-AV1. For example, the VVC encoderis 23% more complex than SVT-AV1 - 9 in single-threading mode (Table 4), but 55%
faster in multithreading mode.

6.

ENCODER ASSESSMENT FOR 8K-UHD BROADCASTINGAND STREAMING

The VVC encoder developed by Spin Digital has also been assessed for 8K video interms of compression efficiency (BD-rate), complexity (CPU time), and performance(multithreaded encoding speed).

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6.1.

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TEST CONDITIONSVideo sequences
A total of eight 1-minute video sequences in 8K format (7680x4320 pixels, 50/59.94/60
fps, 10-bit, PQ/HLG with BT.2020 and SDR with BT.709) were used. Four of them havealready been used for the 4K-UHD case, more specifically: BerlinSeqs (Fraunhofer HHI2022), FollowCar and MC2 (Immersify 2018), and Superposition (Unigine 2017).
Additional sequences include: three footage clips from NHK Technologies called Fuji,
Haru, and Helicopter, and one nature content from The Explorers called Teaser 1 (The
Explorers 2021).
The following table provides more information on the test sequences and, in theseparated appendix, more details including the applied preprocessing operations aredescribed.

Table 6: Technical information of the 8K sequences: producer, type of content, format, SI, TI
ProducerType

FormatSI

TI

BerlinSeqs

Fraunh. HHI

Footage

8Kp60 PQ

100.8 (med)59.3 (low)FollowCar

PSNC

Footage 8Kp59.94 SDR

150.8 (med)113.3 (med)Fuji

NHK Tech.

Timelapse 8Kp59.94 SDR

133.6 (med)20.5 (low)Haru

NHK Tech.

Footage 8Kp59.94 HLG

186.9 (high)65.5 (low)Helicopter

NHK Tech.

Footage 8Kp59.94 SDR

307.5 (high)88.2 (low)

PSNC

Footage 8Kp59.94 SDR

187.2 (high)86.1 (low)MC2Superposition
Teaser1

UnigineCGI

8Kp60 SDR

153.4 (med)92.1 (low)

The Explorers

Footage

8Kp50 PQ

101.6 (med)52.7 (low)Video encoders
Spin Digital VVC encoder was evaluated for 8K using Spin Digital HEVC as the baseline.
Other encoders included in the analysis are: x265, SVT-HEVC, SVT-AV1, NVENC-HEVC,
and OneVPL-AV1. Table 7 shows more information about all these encoders.

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Table 7: Encoders used for 8K compression efficiency and performance analysis
TypeStandard

Company

VersionReleasedate

Reference/
repository

x265

SW

HEVC

Multicore
Ware

3.5

Apr. 2022(FFmpeg 2022)

SVT-HEVC

SW

HEVC

Intel

1.5.1

June 2021(Intel 2022)

NVENC-HEVC

HW

HEVC

Nvidia12.0

Nov. 2022(Nvidia 2022)

Spin Digital HEVC

SW

HEVC

Spin Digital

2.0

Jan. 2023(Spin Digital 2023)

SVT-AV1SW

AV1 Intel & Netflix

1.4.1

Dec. 2022(Intel, Netflix 2022)

OneVPL-AV1

HW

AV1

Intel

2.8

Nov. 2022(Intel 2 2022)

Spin Digital VVC

SW

VVC

Spin Digital

2.0

Feb. 2023(Spin Digital 2023)

Encoding settings
The videos were encoded with the encoding settings for live broadcasting andstreaming described in Section 5.3 and a bitrate range between 30 Mbps and 100
Mbps in steps of 10 Mbps.

Encoder presets
Spin Digital’s VVC and HEVC encoders were configured with the fast preset, which iscapable of achieving 8K real-time operation on a single server. Other encoders wereconfigured with presets of similar quality or complexity.

6.2.

COMPRESSION EFFICIENCY AND ENCODING COMPLEXITY

The results from the point of view of compression efficiency and complexity aresummarised in Figures 13 to 16 using the PSNR, XPSNR, MS-SSIM, and VMAF metrics.
As can be observed, Spin Digital VVC achieves BD-rate savings with respect to Spin
Digital HEVC of 22.29% (PSNR), 22.60% (XPSNR), 18.34% (MS-SSIM), and 27.22%(VMAF). This compression efficiency comes at the cost of 47% more encoding
complexity.

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Figure 13: PSNR BD-Rate and CPU utilisation time for 8K video relative to Spin Digital HEVC forthe encoders and presets under evaluation

Spin Digital VVC achieves a BD-rate reduction from 18.32%(MS-SSIM) up to 27.22% (VMAF) over Spin Digital HEVC at 1.47
times the computational complexity.

Figure 14: XPSNR BD-Rate and CPU utilisation time for 8K video relative to Spin Digital HEVC forthe encoders and presets under evaluation

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Figure 15: MS-SSIM BD-Rate and CPU utilisation time for 8K video relative to Spin Digital HEVC
for the encoders and presets under evaluation

NVENC-HEVC and OneVPL-AV1 produce, respectively, PSNR
BD-rate increases of up to 101% and 78% with respect to Spin
Digital VVC.

Figure 16: VMAF BD-Rate and CPU utilisation time for 8K video relative to Spin Digital HEVC forthe encoders and presets under evaluation

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In addition, Spin Digital VVC achieves a higher PSNR BD-rate savings (22.29%) than
SVT-AV1 - 8 (16.48%), where 8 is its highest quality preset for 8K video, while being 32%
less complex (CPU time of 1.47x compared to 2.16x).
When compared to x265 - slower, Spin Digital VVC also provides similar or higher
compression efficiency (e.g. -6.80% for PSNR, -11.37% for XPSNR, +4.05% for VMAF) ()and, at the same time, about 12 times lower complexity (CPU time of 1.47x versus
17.38x).
It is also observed that both GPU-based hardware encoders exhibit high compression
efficiency losses (PSNR BD-rate increases) with respect to Spin Digital HEVC and VVC.
When compared to Spin Digital VVC, the BD-rate losses based on PSNR are: between
55% and 101% for NVENC-HEVC and between 63% and 78% for OneVPL-AV1.

6.3.

COMPRESSION EFFICIENCY PER SEQUENCE

Table 8 shows detailed information per sequence on the BD-rate and CPU timeachieved by Spin Digital VVC relative to the baseline.

Table 8: Results for 8K video in terms of BD-rate and CPU time for each 8K video sequenceachieved by Spin Digital VVC referred to Spin Digital HEVC. The bitrate range for BD-rate
calculation is from 30 Mbps to 100 Mbps
Video Sequence

PSNR
BD-rate [%]XPSNRBD-rate [%]MS-SSIM
BD-rate [%]VMAF
BD-rate [%]BerlinSeqs-21.88-22.03-18.66-24.81

FollowCar-27.41-28.68-25.25-22.48Fuji-18.84-19.73-17.99-26.32Haru-21.98-21.76-8.75-35.48

Helicopter-29.48-28.79-24.81-37.34MC2-17.69-19.36-14.14-19.29Superposition-21.40-20.92-19.90-31.05Teaser 1-18.85-18.79-15.93-18.55

Average-22.29-22.60-18.34-27.22

According to the results, Spin Digital VVC achieves consistent BD-rate gains across all
test video sequences.

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MULTITHREADED ENCODING SPEED

The software encoders were executed on the server with two Intel Xeon Platinum 8368
CPUs (2x 38 cores), which were configured enabling the maximum number of threads.
The RTX 3070 and ARC A770 GPUs installed in the server were used to measure theperformance of NVENC-HEVC and OneVPL-AV1, respectively.
BerlinSeqs (8Kp60 10-bit HDR) was the video clip used in these experiments, which is
the most challenging sequence of the test set in terms of encoding speed and, at thesame time, its BD-rate results are comparable to the average.
For each encoder and preset, the video was encoded at a bitrate that produced a PSNR
of 44.4 dB, which is considered a broadcast-grade quality level for this sequence.
Figure 17 shows the encoding speed results for the bitrate required to obtain the same
quality.

Figure 17: Actual bitrate for a PSNR of 44.4 dB and encoding speed produced by the encoders
when encoding BerlinSeqs using two Intel Xeon Platinum 8368 CPUs (2x 38 cores) for thesoftware encoders, the RTX 3070 GPU for NVENC, and the ARC A770 GPU for OneVPL

As can be observed, Spin Digital HEVC is able to produce a performance beyond 60 fps(77.61 fps) on a 2x38-core server, which is enough headroom to guarantee 8Kp60
real-time encoding.
The results also indicate that Spin Digital VVC has sufficient margin to compress
8Kp30 video in real-time (48.60 fps) on the same server.

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At a similar encoding speed, this encoder produces a significantly lower bitrate than
SVT-HEVC and NVENC-HEVC. For example, Spin Digital VVC generates a bitrate of
37.79 Mbps, whereas SVT-HEVC - 9 and NVENC-HEVC - 1 need to increase the bitrate by
58.2% and 72.0% to obtain the same quality.
The x265, SVT-AV1 and OneVPL encoders are not capable of producing the necessary
performance to operate in real-time even at 30 fps. Although SVT-AV1 - 12 produced anaverage speed of 32.2 fps, it has not enough headroom to guarantee stable real-time
operation.

Spin Digital’s VVC encoder is able to compress 8Kp30 video inreal-time with the lowest bitrate for a given target quality using
a dual-socket CPU server.

8K 60 fps live encoding is not possible with the current generation of CPU
architectures. By combining Spin Digital software optimizations and the next
generation of CPUs, which will include more and faster cores, the VVC encoder will beable to deliver broadcast grade-quality and reach the performance required for 8K live
video encoding at 60 fps with 10-bit and HDR.

7.

4K/8K VVC LIVE STREAMING AND BROADCASTING

For a video encoder to work reliably in a live streaming environment, several
requirements in terms of performance and features should be met:●

High average encoding speed: The performance of the encoder should be on
average higher than the target video frame rate (e.g. 60 fps), with a sufficienttolerance margin so that the instantaneous speed does not fall below the target
frame rate in case of complex scenes. This requirement has been proven in
Sections 5.8 and 6.3 for the Spin Digital VVC encoder for 4Kp60 and 8Kp30
video, respectively.

●

Stable performance over time: The encoder should also exhibit a stableencoding speed over time in order to prevent frame dropping that can degrade
the temporal continuity of the encoded video.

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Real-time operation mode: The encoder should process the content at thetarget video resolution and frame rate, but if the content is too complex and theunderlying compute architecture does not have the required performance, theencoder should drop input frames instead of adding encoding delay.

●

HRD compliance: The synchronisation of encoders and decoders in live
applications is defined by the HRD model, which specifies constraints on picture
timing, buffer size and buffer handling. To ensure high-quality and smoothplayback, appropriate encoding decisions should be made to prevent buffer
overflows and underflows while providing consistent video quality over time.

●

I/O modules: The live encoder should be equipped with I/O modules that canreceive an uncompressed video and audio from the source (e.g. a camera) via
SDI or a contribution stream over IP, and deliver the compressed output stream
either over HTTP (e.g. HLS, DASH) or TS-over-IP (e.g. UDP, RTP, SRT), or both
simultaneously.

As already stated in Section 4, the VVC encoder has been integrated into a complete
framework (SDK) and application designed to fulfil all the above requirements (Figure
2).

Using the new encoder, a complete VVC live encoding, streaming, playback workflow
for 4Kp60 and 8Kp30 10-bit video was demonstrated at the IBC Exhibition in
Amsterdam on September 15-18, 2022 (Spin Digital 2 2022) as well as at InterBEE inTokyo (Japan) on November 16-18, 2022 (Fraunhofer IIS 2022). Figure 18 shows live
workflow in action at IBC 2022, which is composed of three components:●

Uncompressed media player: A real-time software media player developed by
Spin Digital that plays uncompressed YUV video over 12G-SDI in 4K and 8K
resolutions together with PCM audio (Spin Digital 3 2022).

●

VVC real-time encoder: An encoding server with 12G-SDI video capture, VVC
video and MPEG-H 3D audio encoding, and HTTP and TS-over-IP streaming
modules (Spin Digital 2023).

●

VVC media player: A playback PC running Spin Digital’s VVC media player,
which handles VVC and MPEG-H decoding, video and audio rendering, and 4K
and 8K video output over GPU with HDMI interface (Spin Digital 4 2022).

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Figure 18: Spin Digital demonstrating live 8Kp30 VVC encoding, streaming, and playback at IBC
2022

This workflow demonstrates that VVC UHD live encoding and streaming is now
possible with current computing technologies and highly optimised VVC encoder anddecoder software solutions.

VVC UHD live encoding and streaming is now possible with Spin
Digital’s VVC encoder and decoder software solutions runningon current computing technologies.

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8.

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CONCLUSIONSIn this paper a VVC/H.266 real-time software encoder has been presented. The new
encoder is designed to produce the compression, quality, and performance levels
required for high-end UHD live streaming and broadcasting applications.
The main highlights of the VVC real-time encoder are summarised next:●

Higher compression efficiency than a state-of-the-art HEVC live encoder: The
VVC encoder achieves, for 4K video, a BD-rate reduction of 17.5% with respect
to a highly optimised HEVC real-time encoder (Spin Digital HEVC). This has
been possible at the cost of 1.65 times the computational complexity of Spin
Digital HEVC, which is considered reasonable and has been proven feasible withcurrent generation of CPU architectures. The results for 8K video have shownthat the VVC encoder developed by Spin Digital achieves a BD-rate savings of
25.9% relative to the HEVC live encoder with 1.45 times greater complexity.

●

Real-time UHD video encoding on a single dual-socket server: The VVC
encoder is a highly-optimised CPU-based software solution that can process 4K
video at 60 fps as well as 8K video at 30 fps, both in 10-bit HDR, in real-time ona single server with two Intel Xeon Platinum CPUs with a total of 76 CPU cores.

●

Outperforming optimised software HEVC and AV1 encoders: When running ona multi-core CPU system targeting 4K 60 fps real-time operation, the VVC
encoder produces the required encoding performance and results in the highest
compression efficiency when compared to optimised open-source HEVC and
AV1 software encoders such as x265, SVT-HEVC, and SVT-AV1●

Higher compression efficiency than hardware-accelerated encoders: For 4K
video, the NVENC-HEVC and OneVPL-AV1 encoders yield under real-time
conditions, respectively, a BD-rate increase of about 20% relative to Spin Digital
HEVC. These encoders produce BD-rate increases between 40% and 45%
compared to Spin Digital's VVC encoder. The compression efficiency losses for
8K video are even higher: 55% (NVENC-HEVC) and 68% (OneVPL-AV1) whenusing their highest quality presets.

●

Ready for 4K/8K live streaming and broadcasting: The VVC encoder has been
integrated into a live encoding and streaming application and SDK developed by
Spin Digital that includes: input capture via SDI and IP, pre-processing,pre-analysis, advanced rate control, audio and video encoding, and broadcast
over IP and Internet streaming. Together with Spin Digital’s VVC decoder andmedia player (Spin Player VVC), the end-to-end VVC encoding, streaming, andplayback workflow has been successfully validated for 4Kp60 and 8Kp30
videos.

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The VVC encoder assessed in this whitepaper is the first generation of a VVC
CPU-based software implementation, and it is expected that the encoder will improveover time for delivering UHD live video at higher quality with lower bitrates. VVC live
encoding improvements will emerge with the use of new and more advanced encoding
algorithms combined with the increased performance of next-generation CPU
architectures. As a result, it is expected that the VVC encoder will be able to compress
8Kp60 10-bit HDR video in real-time for live applications with increased compression
and quality.

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Spin Digital Video Technologies GmbH.
Helmholtzstraße 2-9, 10587 Berlin. Germany
www.spin-digital.com | info@spin-digital.com

Spin Digital and Spin Enc Live, Spin Player HEVC, and Spin Player VVC
are trademarks of Spin Digital Video Technologies GmbH.
Other trademarks remain the property of their owners, and are used here
for descriptive purposes.

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