BBC VC-2: anyone ?

[PatchWorKs]

After long time, I recently surfed the BBC R&D website and discovered their new VC-2 Video Compression project.

Does anyone tested/builded/compared it ?

https://github.com/bbc/vc2-reference

[SeeMoreDigital]

BBC R&D: https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/projects/vc-2
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_(video_compression_format)#VC-2

[benwaggoner]

VC-2 is a I-frame only subset of the Dirac wavelet codec, which never got much market traction. Dirac had no hardware encoders or decoders, nor any production-grade software encoders. It wasn't as good as H.264/x264 as an interframe codec back then. No wavelet-based interframe codec has ever been competitive against block-based codecs of its era, although intraframe-only wavelets have been popular in codecs like Cineform and J2K. I don't recall any indication that VC-2 had any substantive enough advantage over J2K to merit switching to it.

As an I-frame only codec, VC-2's use cases were archives, mezzanines and transport. I'm not aware of any production implementations of VC-2, however, and it's been the better part of a decade since I've heard of any further development of either Dirac or VC-2.

Newer technologies like JPEG XS are superior at addressing J2K and VC-2 for transport. Most mezzanine/archive stuff gets done in ProRes or J2K these days, with some high end using ACES.

[Blue_MiSfit]

From what I understand, Open Broadcast Systems (Kieranrk here on doom9 is their CEO) uses VC-2 in certain cases in production on their live encoding solution for transport.