A Comparative Analysis of the Time and Energy Demand of Versatile Video Coding and High Efficiency Video Coding Reference Decoders

TL;DR

This study compares the energy and time demands of VTM-7.0 and HM-16.20 decoders, revealing significant energy increases in VTM, and proposes a new configuration that reduces energy consumption by over 17%.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed comparison of software decoder energy consumption between VVC and HEVC codecs and introduces a new configuration to improve energy efficiency.

Findings

VTM decoder consumes significantly more energy than HM.

Energy demand increases by over 80% for certain configurations.

Disabling SIMD instructions raises energy demand by up to 207%.

Abstract

This paper investigates the decoding energy and decoding time demand of VTM-7.0 in relation to HM-16.20. We present the first detailed comparison of two video codecs in terms of software decoder energy consumption. The evaluation shows that the energy demand of the VTM decoder is increased significantly compared to HM and that the increase depends on the coding configuration. For the coding configuration randomaccess, we find that the decoding energy is increased by over 80% at a decoding time increase of over 70%. Furthermore, results indicate that the energy demand increases by up to 207% when Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) instructions are disabled, which corresponds to the HM implementation style. By measurements, it is revealed that the coding tools MIP, AMVR, TPM, LFNST, and MTS increase the energy efficiency of the decoder. Furthermore, we propose a new coding configuration based on our analysis, which reduces the energy demand of the VTM decoder by over 17% on average.