Kvazaar HEVC encoder license changed to 3-clause BSD

[Fador]

So after a long time of trying to get the permissions from my supervisors, we were able to convince them that the license change would be in order ;)

New release v2.1 with the new BSD license:
https://github.com/ultravideo/kvazaar/releases/tag/v2.1.0

Hackernews post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28851307

[Boulder]

Thank you, it is always nice to see fellow Finns develop things :)

Are there any quality comparisons to competitors available somewhere?

[Fador]

Thank you, it is always nice to see fellow Finns develop things :)

Torille jne ;)


Are there any quality comparisons to competitors available somewhere?

We have at least some limited comparisons with HM and x265, you can find the publications here with direct pdf links:
http://ultravideo.fi/#publications

Kvazaar 2.0 paper seems to be the latest, and I believe x265 also got some boost on performance after this:

A. Lemmetti, M. Viitanen, A. Mercat, and J. Vanne, “Kvazaar 2.0: fast and efficient open-source HEVC inter encoder,” in Proc. ACM Multimedia Syst. Conf., Istanbul, Turkey, June 2020.
[pdf] (https://researchportal.tuni.fi/files/42239536/ACMMMSys20_camera_ready_submission1.pdf)

[rbauer]

Hi.

I'm trying to test.

Could someone help me to how to transcode an mp4 file (x264 video and aac audio: I want to transcode the video stream only) to a kvazaar's hevc file?

I tried with

kvazaar -i input.mp4 --input-res 1528x940 -o output.hevc --preset slow --threads 4

no luck, the video is garbage (maybe because the encoder accepts files in yuv format only, right?).


Thanks

[Fador]

no luck, the video is garbage (maybe because the encoder accepts files in yuv format only, right?).


Hi!

Kvazaar only supports yuv and y4m, supporting mp4 would mean that we would need to embed ffmpeg or similar, and we want to keep things simple =)

But you should be able to do it with the help of ffmpeg:
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -an -f rawvideo -pix_fmt yuv420p - | kvazaar -i - --input-res 1528x940 -o output.hevc --preset slow --threads 4

Actually ffmpeg also has support for kvazaar (http://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-codecs.html#libkvazaar) but you have to compile it in separately, then you could do it like:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:a copy -c:v libkvazaar -kvazaar-params preset=slow output.mp4

Not sure if any binary distributions of ffmpeg include kvazaar at the moment..

[rbauer]

Many thanks Fador.