Intel SVT-HEVC encoder

[TEB]

hi, anyone tested this one? and benchmarked it with speed vs. quality (VMAF 95ish) ?

https://github.com/intel/SVT-HEVC


https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...Speed-Progress


Reading this :
https://01.org/sites/default/files/d...sual_cloud.pdf

SVT-HEVC achieves similar quality levels to those of HM16, while being 70:1 faster, and similar quality
levels to those of x265 very slow, while being 176:1 faster.

Quite the statement

[benwaggoner]

It doesn't have as deep tuning parameters as x265, but offers subjective quality optimization and deeper reference frame hierarchy. And they even have subjective DMOS scores!

I don't see at what bitrates the comparisons are made, though. If at really high bitrates, it's not that exciting to say "subjective quality is similar to other encoders." Testing should be done in the range so that the very best encode has at least a Just Noticeable Difference from the source. Thus the codecs are demonstrating at bitrates where "perfect" isn't obtainable, and we can see the tradeoffs and blind spots of each.

Also, I am reminded that x265 still doesn't include --tskip in veryslow or placebo. Stock "veryslow" still has more juice to squeeze out (although at further cost of speed). I'm guessing this test used pre 3.0 x265, so the performance difference compared to 3.0's veryslow would be even bigger.

[utack]

x265 can now also use SVT
http://x265.org/x265-svt-hevc-house/

[dipje]

I've done a very short (and wrong ) test with 1.3 compiled into ffmpeg 4.1.

I've re-encoded a 5 second clip Sony 1920x1080 25fps h264 +/- 50mbit slog2 that had a small object moving fast.
As a baseline tried starving the codecs a bit.
X264 preset slow, two pass 500k bitrate, yielded a VMAF +/- 76.
X265 preset medium two pass 500k bitrate, yielded a VMAF +/- 86 (but was slower to encode )
Libsvt_hevc vbr to actually hit around 600k (single pass always ) , yielded a VMAF of +/- 75.

Tried again in cqp mode , changing the qp to hit a bitrate of about twice that. Than tried x264 in preset slow with CRF mode, adjusting the CRF value to get a final filesize that is just under the libsvt one. Svt hit VMAF of 80, x264 VMAF of 86.

So, this isn't a serious test at all. Just a little start for me. The clip is too short, it's ungraded, VMAF doesn't tell you all there is, etc...
But svt seems fast but sacrifices Soo much in the quality that x264 can match it for not that much slower.

It's a software only solution that encodes real-time easily on my 8-series i5 ultrabook...but does not offer Soo much value for 1920x1080 for me it seems.

Again, wrong test so don't take it for granted . Files with proper contrast and 4k would be a much more interesting case.

[benwaggoner]

Originally Posted by dipje

I've done a very short (and wrong ) test with 1.3 compiled into ffmpeg 4.1.

I've re-encoded a 5 second clip Sony 1920x1080 25fps h264 +/- 50mbit slog2 that had a small object moving fast.
As a baseline tried starving the codecs a bit.
X264 preset slow, two pass 500k bitrate, yielded a VMAF +/- 76.
X265 preset medium two pass 500k bitrate, yielded a VMAF +/- 86 (but was slower to encode )
Libsvt_hevc vbr to actually hit around 600k (single pass always ) , yielded a VMAF of +/- 75.

Tried again in cqp mode , changing the qp to hit a bitrate of about twice that. Than tried x264 in preset slow with CRF mode, adjusting the CRF value to get a final filesize that is just under the libsvt one. Svt hit VMAF of 80, x264 VMAF of 86.

So, this isn't a serious test at all. Just a little start for me. The clip is too short, it's ungraded, VMAF doesn't tell you all there is, etc...
But svt seems fast but sacrifices Soo much in the quality that x264 can match it for not that much slower.

It's a software only solution that encodes real-time easily on my 8-series i5 ultrabook...but does not offer Soo much value for 1920x1080 for me it seems.

Again, wrong test so don't take it for granted . Files with proper contrast and 4k would be a much more interesting case.

Hmm. Maybe try --tune VMAF or whatever they call that mode. I would hope that would improve VMAF scores at least . It'd be interesting to see how well the encoder does when given a specific target metric.

For example, one could use --tune psnr in x264, x265, and SVT-HEVC. That would give some insight into how many tools and modes the encoder tries. Although it would look worse than your tests, so it would be more interesting than applicable.

It'd be good to try some longer clips to get a sense of the speed delta. I note that per the updated x265 docs for svt, that it has two modes SLOWER than the placebo equivalent.

[dipje]

so people are actually getting respectable quality out of SVT-HEVC? And then I don't mean that it must match or best x265, but I at least expected it yield better quality than x264-software encoder running at comparable speeds.

I tried again with a slog2->rec709 lut on there and preparing the file to be 25fps and a bit longer (30 seconds), and _visually_ the SVT file isn't that bad actually. It just has a bunch more smoothing on it it seems. So x265 with --no-sao can show small amounts of blocking, while the SVT encode has the blocking smoothed out but otherwise just as enjoyable to watch and the same amount of detail from what I can tell..

Will do my tests with a proper free source and the good old fashioned way of using realistic bitrates and visually inspecting the file to make up my mind

[Atak_Snajpera]

Can somebody test how this SVT-HEVC survives famous park_joy_1080p50.y4m ?

[benwaggoner]

It would be great if people would share the command lines they're using with SVT-HEVC. There's a ton of configurability in there (not as much as x265, but that's a high bar). Some ones where changing from default is likely to have a significant impact on output quality and performance include:

• EncoderMode - quality versus speed; 0 is highest quality and 12 highest speed. x265 maps 2 as placebo, with 0 and 1 below that. Default is 9 which I guess is the rough equivalent of "faster."
• Tune - optimization mode. 0 is visually optimized, which is what we should be testing. 1 is the default (grr) and SSIM/PSNR tuned. 2 is VMAF tuned.
• RateControlMode - default is 0, 1 is VBR where VBR gets applied (and is what matters for real-world scenarios).
• BitRateReduction - only applies to EncoderMode=0, and defaults to on there. Attempts to reduce bitrate without reducing quality (Ala CRF?)
• TargetBitrate - specify target bitrate. Only applies in EncoderMode=1.
• ImproveSharpness - Improves sharpness in EncoderMode=0 for 4K and 8K content. Defaults to on

I am kind of confused about how rate control/quality works here. It seems like optimal quality would be

-encMode 0
-tune 0
-rc 1
-bitrate <bitrate>

No idea how practical -encMode 0 is for speed; that may need to be adjusted. But the above should give a perceptually optimized capped VBR style encode at or below the bitrate value.

[TEB]

Anyone know of a windows or linux build with FFmpeg and SVT compiled together ?

[dipje]

@TEB: I just grabbed the ffmpeg from git (github, not official but real enough) and did a checkout on the 4.1 release. I picked the last release from the IntelSVTHevc from github and it gave directions to apply a patch to the ffmpeg tree. This patch is made for 4.1 and applied cleanly on my build and compiled fine (Windows 10 but WSL Ubuntu 18.04 install). So I don't really have a build to be shared but it compiles cleanly on Ubuntu 18.04 so I guess it shouldn't be that hard to build it yourself if you're asking for Linux binaries.

@Benwaggoner: Played around a bit with piping yuv420p from ffmpeg into the SvcHevcEncApp utility (specifying number of frames, fps, width and height) and that produced way different results than my earlier ffmpeg tests. I don't know if I just gave wrong parameters in ffmpeg, or the ffmpeg-svthevc wrapper is not passing all parameters correctly but these results were WAAAY more usable on the quality side of things, but also took longer to encode.

I can slow SvcHevc right down to 0.5fps on my laptop or up to 88 fps... and it produces results which are more in line with what I expect with those speeds :P. So I'm testing again, my previous results were apparently only on the 'very fast' settings. This makes the encoder way more usable and a 'real encoder' for common use.
(it seems it's been made with the idea to run 'always realtime, adjusting itself as it goes to stay realtime' on recent Xeon cores).

[filler56789]

Has anyone already built a Windows binary through Visual Studio?

It's impossible to compile the d@mn thing with MinGW-w64.

[Jamaika]

Originally Posted by benwaggoner

• EncoderMode - quality versus speed; 0 is highest quality and 12 highest speed. x265 maps 2 as placebo, with 0 and 1 below that. Default is 9 which I guess is the rough equivalent of "faster."
• Tune - optimization mode. 0 is visually optimized, which is what we should be testing. 1 is the default (grr) and SSIM/PSNR tuned. 2 is VMAF tuned.
• RateControlMode - default is 0, 1 is VBR where VBR gets applied (and is what matters for real-world scenarios).
• BitRateReduction - only applies to EncoderMode=0, and defaults to on there. Attempts to reduce bitrate without reducing quality (Ala CRF?)
• TargetBitrate - specify target bitrate. Only applies in EncoderMode=1.
• ImproveSharpness - Improves sharpness in EncoderMode=0 for 4K and 8K content. Defaults to on

I am kind of confused about how rate control/quality works here. It seems like optimal quality would be

-encMode 0
-tune 0
-rc 1
-bitrate <bitrate>

No idea how practical -encMode 0 is for speed; that may need to be adjusted. But the above should give a perceptually optimized capped VBR style encode at or below the bitrate value.

void svt_param_default(x265_param* param)
{
EB_H265_ENC_CONFIGURATION* svtHevcParam = (EB_H265_ENC_CONFIGURATION*)param->svtHevcParam;

//Preset & Tune default
svtHevcParam->encMode = 9; // if (!strcmp(preset, "faster")) svtHevcParam->encMode = 9;
svtHevcParam->tune = 0; // if (!strcmp(tune, "grain")) svtHevcParam->tune = 0; else if (!strcmp(tune, "animation")) svtHevcParam->tune = 0; ???

// Rate Control default
svtHevcParam->frameRate = 60;
svtHevcParam->frameRateNumerator = 0;
svtHevcParam->frameRateDenominator = 0;
svtHevcParam->encoderBitDepth = 8;
svtHevcParam->compressedTenBitFormat = 0;
svtHevcParam->rateControlMode = 0;
svtHevcParam->sceneChangeDetection = 1;
svtHevcParam->lookAheadDistance = (uint32_t)~0;
svtHevcParam->framesToBeEncoded = 0;
svtHevcParam->targetBitRate = 7000000;
svtHevcParam->maxQpAllowed = 48;
svtHevcParam->minQpAllowed = 10;
svtHevcParam->bitRateReduction = 1;

/*vmaf is under development, currently x265 won't support vmaf*/

Originally Posted by filler56789

Has anyone already built a Windows binary through Visual Studio?

It's impossible to compile the d@mn thing with MinGW-w64.

The line isn't here:

    if (encoder->m_param->bEnableSvtHevc)
    {
        EB_H265_ENC_CONFIGURATION* svtParam = (EB_H265_ENC_CONFIGURATION*)encoder->m_svtAppData->svtHevcParams;
        if (pic_in)

[filler56789]

Originally Posted by Jamaika

The line isn't here:

    if (encoder->m_param->bEnableSvtHevc)
    {
        EB_H265_ENC_CONFIGURATION* svtParam = (EB_H265_ENC_CONFIGURATION*)encoder->m_svtAppData->svtHevcParams;
        if (pic_in)

Actually I was talking about something like this:

r:\make6t4\gccs64\830\bin\../lib/gcc/x86_64-w64-mingw32/8.3.0/../../../../x86_64-w64-mingw32/bin/ranlib.exe:
unable to rename '../../../lib/libASM_AVX2.a'; reason: File exists
make[2]: *** [Source/Lib/ASM_AVX2/CMakeFiles/ASM_AVX2.dir/build.make:230: lib/libASM_AVX2.a] Error 1
make[2]: *** Deleting file 'lib/libASM_AVX2.a'
make[1]: *** [CMakeFiles/Makefile2:403: Source/Lib/ASM_AVX2/CMakeFiles/ASM_AVX2.dir/all] Error 2
make: *** [Makefile:130: all] Error 2

[poisondeathray]

Wolfberry has 1.3.0 compiled and in his public share folder
https://drive.google.com/drive/folde...mHKYLzO3elemlC

[Jamaika]

I compiled x265_svt with my own way:
i.e. I delete AVX and leave only SSE2.
What conclusions: doesn't tolerate colormatrix 2020, high-tier and lacks parameters.
Don't add LIBVMAF.

Why is main10? How I added 8bit.

y4m [info]: 1920x1080 fps 29/1 i420p8 sar 1:1 unknown frame count
raw [info]: output file: x265_hightier_crf28_tunegrain.h265
x265 [info]: HEVC encoder version 3.0_Au+8
x265 [info]: build info [Windows][GCC 9.0.1][64 bit][noasm] 8bit
SVT [version]: SVT-HEVC Encoder Lib v1.3.0
SVT [build] : GCC 9.0.1 64 bit
LIB Build date: Feb 28 2019 16:55:02
-------------------------------------------
SVT [Warning]: Color format EB_YUV400 not supported, set to EB_YUV420
Number of logical cores available: 4
Number of PPCS 107
-------------------------------------------
SVT [config]: Main10 Profile Tier (auto) Level (auto)
SVT [config]: EncoderMode / LatencyMode / Tune : 4 / 0 / 0
SVT [config]: EncoderBitDepth / CompressedTenBitFormat / EncoderColorFormat : 8 / 0 / 1
SVT [config]: SourceWidth / SourceHeight : 1920 / 1080
SVT [config]: Fps_Numerator / Fps_Denominator / Gop Size / IntraRefreshType : 29 / 1 / 61 / 2
SVT [config]: HierarchicalLevels / BaseLayerSwitchMode / PredStructure : 3 / 0 / 2
SVT [config]: BRC Mode / QP / LookaheadDistance / SceneChange : CQP / 32 / 17 / 1
SVT [config]: BitRateReduction / ImproveSharpness : 1 / 1
-------------------------------------------

My file only for 8bit. Enjoy.
https://www.sendspace.com/file/ki9z14

[filler56789]

Originally Posted by poisondeathray

Wolfberry has 1.3.0 compiled and in his public share folder
https://drive.google.com/drive/folde...mHKYLzO3elemlC

Thanks for the information. Sadly all that the .EXE can do is crash😒

[Forteen88]

Originally Posted by filler56789

Thanks for the information. Sadly all that the .EXE can do is crash��

It's because you need to install Intel-compiler file "ww_icl_redist_msi_2019.2.190.zip" too!

[benwaggoner]

Originally Posted by poisondeathray

Wolfberry has 1.3.0 compiled and in his public share folder
https://drive.google.com/drive/folde...mHKYLzO3elemlC

How specific are these to a particular Xeon version? I would think they would get tuned and targeted pretty specifically. I wonder how much benefit profiler-guided optimization would provide.

[Jamaika]

Originally Posted by HolyWu

SvtHevcEnc-20190302-19344bd-win64.7z

Built by GCC 8.3.0 both with and without PGO.

Almost good but there are mistakes.
SvtHevcEncApp.exe -i 111.yuv -w 1920 -h 1080 -tune 0 -profile 1 -bit-depth 8 -fps 30000/1001 -asm 0 -encMode 9 -tbr 70000 -compressed-ten-bit-format 0 -b 112.h265
How to add framerate 29.972?
How to add color subsample yuv420? encoderColorFormat = EB_YUV420

[Jamaika]

Where is color format in SvtHevcEncApp.exe?

TOKEN                           DESCRIPTION                     INPUT TYPE

-nch                            NumberOfChannels                Single input
-i                              InputFile                       Single input
-b                              StreamFile                      Single input
-errlog                         ErrorFile                       Single input
-o                              ReconFile                       Single input
-qp-file                        QpFile                          Single input
-interlaced-video               InterlacedVideo                 Single input
-separate-fields                SeperateFields                  Single input
-w                              SourceWidth                     Single input
-h                              SourceHeight                    Single input
-n                              FrameToBeEncoded                Single input
-nb                             BufferedInput                   Single input
-base-layer-switch-mode         BaseLayerSwitchMode             Single input
-encMode                        EncoderMode                     Single input
-intra-period                   IntraPeriod                     Single input
-irefresh-type                  IntraRefreshType                Single input
-fps                            FrameRate                       Single input
-fps-num                        FrameRateNumerator              Single input
-fps-denom                      FrameRateDenominator            Single input
-bit-depth                      EncoderBitDepth                 Single input
-compressed-ten-bit-format      CompressedTenBitFormat          Single input
-hierarchical-levels            HierarchicalLevels              Single input
-pred-struct                    PredStructure                   Single input
-scd                            SceneChangeDetection            Single input
-q                              QP                              Single input
-use-q-file                     UseQpFile                       Single input
-rc                             RateControlMode                 Single input
-lad                            LookAheadDistance               Single input
-tbr                            TargetBitRate                   Single input
-max-qp                         MaxQpAllowed                    Single input
-min-qp                         MinQpAllowed                    Single input
-dlf                            LoopFilterDisable               Single input
-sao                            SAO                             Single input
-use-default-me-hme             UseDefaultMeHme                 Single input
-hme                            HME                             Single input
-search-w                       SearchAreaWidth                 Single input
-search-h                       SearchAreaHeight                Single input
-constrd-intra                  ConstrainedIntra                Single input
-tune                           Tune                            Single input
-lp                             LogicalProcessors               Single input
-ss                             TargetSocket                    Single input
-rt                             SwitchThreadsToRtPriority       Single input
-brr                            BitRateReduction                Single input
-sharp                          ImproveSharpness                Single input
-vid-info                       VideoUsabilityInfo              Single input
-hdr                            HighDynamicRangeInput           Single input
-ua-delm                        AccessUnitDelimiter             Single input
-pbuff                          BufferingPeriod                 Single input
-tpic                           PictureTiming                   Single input
-reg-user-data                  RegisteredUserData              Single input
-unreg-user-data                UnregisteredUserData            Single input
-recovery-point                 RecoveryPoint                   Single input
-max-cll                        MaxCLL                          Single input
-max-fall                       MaxFALL                         Single input
-use-master-display             UseMasterDisplay                Single input
-master-display                 MasterDisplay                   Single input
-dolby-vision-profile           DolbyVisionProfile              Single input
-dolby-vision-rpu               DolbyVisionRpuFile              Single input
-nalu-file                      NaluFile                        Single input
-temporal-id                    TemporalId                      Single input
-fpsinvps                       FPSInVPS                        Single input
-inj                            Injector                        Single input
-inj-frm-rt                     InjectorFrameRate               Single input
-speed-ctrl                     SpeedControlFlag                Single input
-profile                        Profile                         Single input
-tier                           Tier                            Single input
-level                          Level                           Single input
-latency-mode                   LatencyMode                     Single input
-asm                            AsmType                         Single input

What are we framerate by -fps-denom 1001 -fps-num 30000?

Video
ID                                       : 1
Format                                   : HEVC
Format/Info                              : High Efficiency Video Coding
Format profile                           : Main@L3.1@Main
Codec ID                                 : hvc1
Codec ID/Info                            : High Efficiency Video Coding
Duration                                 : 2 s 880 ms
Bit rate                                 : 1 909 kb/s
Maximum bit rate                         : 2 543 kb/s
Width                                    : 1 280 pixels
Height                                   : 720 pixels
Display aspect ratio                     : 16:9
Frame rate mode                          : Constant
Frame rate                               : 25.000 FPS
Color space                              : YUV
Chroma subsampling                       : 4:2:0
Bit depth                                : 8 bits
Bits/(Pixel*Frame)                       : 0.083
Stream size                              : 671 KiB (100%)
Title                                    : h265@GPAC0.7.2-DEV-rev991-gac74c900-master
Encoded date                             : UTC 2019-03-04 16:16:40
Tagged date                              : UTC 2019-03-04 16:16:40
Codec configuration box                  : hvcC

The color format doesn't work. After removing the command, I have it.