Video Codec Analysis Services

Our team has 10 years of experience in video codec and video processing algorithms analysis, tuning and consulting. One of our research directions is video codec analysis &ndash we have prepared more than 25 video codec analysis reports, including public and private reports. Public reports are available at MSU Video Codec Comparison page. We have a long-term collaboration with Moscow State University Graphics&Media Lab for video codec analysis tasks.

We provide several types of codec analysis for codec developers companies, and for encoding solutions users and professionals. Typical use-case for that work is to analyse customer's encoder encoding quality, to compare it with the competitive solutions and to show weak point of encoder.

Private Codec Comparison

Private codec comparison is one of the most popular analysis type that we perform. It is comparative analysis of clients encoder and other encoders – client will know place of its encoder between other newest well-known encoders (compare encoding quality, speed, bitrate handling, etc.).

This type of analysis is very flexible and could be easily customized.

• Encoding presets: we can analyze up to 20 different presets of clients codec. Presets could be send by customer, or we could choose them using special preset selection subsystem to use best (in terms speed/quality trade-off) presets
• Competitive codecs: we can sue almost any codecs as competitors, these codecs could be freeware codec, or commercial codec send by customers, etc.
• Video sequences: we have representative test set of video sequences, but it could be flexibly customized by client request.

Example: the result will be similar for public comparison, like MSU MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 Video Codecs Comparison but much more analysis, pages and graphs as in Enterprise Edition of the comparison.

Periodical Codec Testing

We can provide on-line web-based testing service for you. You upload your codec (new codec or new version of codec) to our server, and receive speed/quality graphs for this codec and previously uploaded codecs in 1-3 days.

This is very useful solution if you plan to test codecs frequently (for example 2-5 times at year) for finding better encoding quality. The price for such type of service could be with half-year and year licenses.

Example &ndash x264 vs. WebM (VP8) comparison.

Encoding Options Efficiency Analysis

Encoding options efficiency analysis consists of fast Pareto-optimal presets search not using full search for all possible options types. "Optimal" term stands for speed/quality trade-off, that could be measured using objective metrics (SSIM, PSNR) and encoding speed for target platform. This task is very difficult because of huge number of different encoding options combinations (up to billions) and we propose solution for automatic optimal preset search for chosen use-case or content type. This is unique method for fast options efficiency analysis.

Customer could provide us codec with set of options to analyze and video sequences to perform presets search for specific use-cases. Also other restrictions for presets depending on use-cases (target bitrate, quality, etc.) can be taken into account.

Typical deliverables for this analysis:

• Set of Pareto-optimal encoding settings for every tested platform (if there were many of them) and use-case.
• Detailed report with performed analysis description and recommendation of preset usage for different platforms and use-cases.
• All the data obtained during analysis.

Example &ndash x264 Codec Capabilities Analysis

Decoder Analysis on Corrupted Streams

We can perform decoder analysis on corrupted streams to estimate video error concealment methods of decoder for different syntax elements and error types.

The main idea is to corrupt source video stream with specific way, e.g. some syntax elements types and then to decode it with your decoder to analyze decoding quality and error concealment methods.

Other services

Also we perform analysis of image and video processing algorithms:

• Brightness, Contrast, and Saturation
• Deblocking
• Deinterlacing
• Denoising
• Scaling
• Video Stabilization
• Motion Estimation
• etc.

It could be done with the same manner as for video codec analysis, using objective metrics, testing set and synthetic sequences.

Contact Information

For any information or questions on ViCoS or video codec analysis and tuning contracts, please contact our