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MSU Video Codecs Comparisons 2023-2024:
Call for Codecs

#1 codecs comparisons in the world

Video group head:	Dr. Dmitriy Vatolin
Project head:	Dr. Dmitriy Kulikov
Measurements, analysis:	Nickolay Safonov, Aleksandr Kostychev, Anna Bigler

compression.ru

Lomonosov
Moscow State University (MSU)
Graphics and Media Lab

Dubna International
State University

MSU Institute of Advanced
Studies of Artificial Intelligence
and Intelligent Systems

Important Dates

September, 20	4K comparison application deadline (The submit system will be opened closer to the deadline)
February, 26	FPGA/Hardware comparison application deadline
December, 25	FullHD comparison application deadline

You can apply for participation using this form:

Or contact us

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Important updates

About

2023-2024 Comparison parts

New features
Comparison Rules and Methodology
Frequently asked question (FAQ)
Participate
Feedback
Thanks
Contact

Important updates

Only Linux compatible encoders this year
Subjective and Objective FullHD parts share

Speed alignment:

Only one submission iteration
We align the encoders' speed by bitrate on 7-10 publicly available videos that represent the complexity of the set. We will use 5 main objective quality metrics for speed-quality alignment
Each encoder should have relative speed less than 100% to reference encoder by all main metrics

Clarity and fairness of the publication

For each participant, the following information is fixed before the measurement begins and cannot be updated afterwards:

encoder name
encoder developer
developer contacts
publication conditions

Each team can only publish one encoder (preset) for each standard
We will share for each metric published on the site the place of the encoder (including private ones, without names)

About Annual MSU Video Codecs Comparisons

We perform comparative unbiased analysis for

software implementations
hardware (GPU-based) implementations
cloud-based implementations

of different video coding standards (H.265/HEVC, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, AV1, VP9, VP8, MPEG-4 and other) using objective metrics (SSIM, VMAF, PSNR and other).

With MSU Codecs Comparison developers can verify the performance of their codec. We share test sequences, encoding parameters and codecs versions so all developers can reproduce the results of the comparison. Participation with publishing of all results is for FREE. Private participation is for fee (contact us for the details).

MSU codecs analysis team has been conducting video codec analysis, testing and optimization since 2004. Some facts about previous MSU Video Codecs Comparisons:

There were more than 400.000 downloads of previous H.264/MPEG-4 AVC and H.265/HEVC video codec comparisons reports
Many codecs' bugs were found and reported to developers
240+ encoders were tested
More than 100 private reports for codec developers (description of codec's weak and strong points) after public report versions

Summary report topics:

Objective measurements
Subjective analysis
Encoding time
Speed/Quality trade-off analysis
Averaged objective results analysis
Leaders in different use cases

2023-2024 Comparison parts and requirements

FullHD Comparison

Subjective Comparison

4K Comparison

FPGA/Hardware-accelerated/
Ultra-fast Comparison

Use Cases

Real-time
VoD
Offline

Real-time
VoD:
Offline

Real-time
VoD
Offline

Ultra-fast

Videos

50 FullHD videos

10 FullHD videos

20 4K videos

50 FullHD videos

Objective metrics

Objective metrics: SSIM, PSNR, VMAF
3 color-planes - Y,U,V with different proportions: 4:11, 6:1:1, 8:11, 10:11
Powered by VQMT

Subjective metrics

Yes, powered by: Subjectify.us

Target Bitrate

FullHD H.264: 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15 Mbps
FullHD H.265: 0.7, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 10 Mbps
FullHD AV1, VVC: 0.25, 0.5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 Mbps
4K H.264: 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 14, 20 Mbps
4K H.265: 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12 Mbps
4K AV1, VVC: 0.5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8 Mbps

Hardware

CPU: Intel Core i7 12700K (Alder Lake)
SSD: 1Tb
RAM: 4x16GB (64GB)
OS: Windows 11 x64, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

FPGA Xilinx Alveo U250
GPU: NVIDIA Titan RTX,
Intel Arc

Download requirements

New features in MSU Video Codecs Comparison

Since 2022	Updated hardware to Alder Lake Quality-alignment instead of speed-alignment Enlarging of video collection
Since 2020	Automatic codecs submission system Open to compare Linux-based solutions Open to compare cloud-based solutions Enlarging of video collection
Since 2019	Increasing the number of test videos up to 100+, adding UGC (user-generated) videos (vlogs, noise videos, etc.) and HDR videos Open to compare cloud-based solutions Enlarging of video collection Going to use new no-reference metrics
Since 2018	Increased target bitrates for comparison on 4K videos Started to use VMAF objective metric Upgraded testing hardware to Coffee Lake Enlarged video collection (15833 videos)

Comparison Rules and Methodology

2023-2024 Comparison methodology in presentation

Please pay attention that we will use multi-core CPU for encoding, so you can use multi-threading

Decoding is performed with reference decoder (H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, VP9, AV1). For other standards participants should provide decoder
We don't limit GOP size and intra-period
We don't limit number of passes in the encoding. Total encoding time should fulfill use case speed requirements

Comparison Rules

Applying for participating, you agree with comparison rules.

Codec Requirements

Presets for different speed requirements should be provided by the developers
Codec should allow to set arbitrary bitrate of resulting stream in constant quality mode
Preferable codec interface - console codec version (with batch processing support - bitrate and file names must be possible to assign from the command line)
Encoder should be compatible with reference decoder, for encoders of custom standards a decoder should be provided

Developers Deliverables

The following deliverables should be provided by each developer:

Codec files (CLI executable file is preferable)
Codec's presets

Frequently asked questions (FAQ)

If you have any more questions about rules or methodology please refer to FAQ or contact us at

Take part in 2023-2024 Video Codecs Comparison!

Deepest codecs review: 5 reports, including subjective with 1000+ viewers and 7000+ charts

Our pipeline of codecs testing:

Prepare encoder. After your application, we send you instructions on how to prepare encoding presets for this year testing use cases (there are limitations for speed) and login for a submission system.
Submission. You send us encoder and presets (our hardware characteristics can be found on the comparison page). Testing methodology is described in presentation.
Speed and quality pre-check. We test the speed of your encoder. We let you know if some speedup is needed or any bugs are found. If the requirements are not satisfied, you submit an updated version and we test it again. Finally, when all requirements are satisfied, you confirm the usage of presets and encoder.
Measurements. We perform the main measurements on this year test video set and prepare a draft of the report. This will take about 1-3 months depending on the number of participants.
Draft report and verification. We send you a draft report with your results and the results of other public participants. You can double-check the results. If you participate privately, in this step you will need to decide whether you will publish your results.
Report release. After your confirmation, we prepare and publish the final report on the comparison page. We send you the Enterprise version of the report (with all sequences, charts, etc.).