New study shows MPEG-5 LCEVC improves video quality for VOD applications

According to a new study from V-Nova – a video compression solutions provider – conducted with Intel and Meta, MPEG-5 Low Complexity Enhancement Video Coding (LCEVC) enhances compression performance for tested codecs, showing improved video quality in conditions typically used for VOD encoding by streaming or social network services.

The study (published by the International Society for Optics and Photonics – SPIE) quantifies the impact of LCEVC in improving the compression efficiency versus complexity trade-offs of native SVT-AV1, x264 and x265 codecs for VOD applications. Over 650,000 encodes were tested, comprising of 140 self-similar clips, across eight resolutions, multiple bitrates and 25 different pre-sets, using four different visual quality metrics: VMAF, VMAF_NEG, PSNR and SSIM.

The study also finds that MPEG-5 LCEVC improves computational performance, with LCEVC-enhanced video achieving the same quality levels at approximately 40% computations when used in conjunction with SVT-AV1 (as opposed to when MPEG-5 LCEVC was not used). The company says the combination of LCEVC and SVT-AV1 builds on “already notable improvements of SVT-AV1 and showcases the concrete possibility for widespread and energy efficient deployments.”

According to the study, enhancing AV1 with LCEVC broadens the set of mobile devices capable of playing back full HD AV1 content. Mobile battery life was also extended by up to 50% compared with non-enhanced streams using AV1 software decoders Dav1d and GAV1.

Guido Meardi, CEO, V-Nova, says: “The results published by SPIE follow an amazing effort between all parties, leveraging on the knowledge, experience and methodology of Intel and Meta to finally provide a set of quantitative results showing the benefits of MPEG-5 LCEVC in a very relevant use case.” V-Net