A Complete End-To-End Open Source Toolchain for the Versatile Video Coding (VVC) Standard

TL;DR

This paper introduces open-source software tools that enable complete end-to-end encoding, decoding, packaging, and streaming of VVC video content, facilitating wider adoption of the new standard.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive open-source toolchain for VVC, including encoding, decoding, packaging, and streaming capabilities, one year after standard finalization.

Findings

Open-source VVC encoder (VVenC) and decoder (VVdeC) are available.

Integration with GPAC and FFmpeg enables practical application scenarios.

Tutorials demonstrate encoding, playback, and adaptive streaming with VVC.

Abstract

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.