VVC
Recent moves by Amazon and Dolby may hint at a growing interest in VVC (Versatile Video Coding).
Amazon’s Acquisition of MX Player
On Wednesday, June 5, Amazon agreed to acquire key assets of Indian video streaming service MX Player from Times Internet, reportedly in a bid to increase sales and brand awareness in India. As reported by TechCrunch, “the deal values MX Player at less than $100 million, far short of the $500 million valuation at which the streamer raised its last capital.”
MX Player was an early adopter of VVC for software playback. Though Amazon’s primary motivation for the deal was as stated, if VVC plays well in software on mobile devices in India while cutting bandwidth costs significantly, perhaps it can do this in other regions, particularly those associated with more powerful mobile devices than India.
Dolby’s Acquisition of GE Licensing
On Thursday, June 6, Dolby agreed to acquire GE Licensing in a $429 million all-cash transaction. According to the Dolby press release, “GE Licensing’s portfolio of video codec technology, such as HEVC and VVC, complements, strengthens, and expands the scale of Dolby’s intellectual property portfolio. Dolby is committed to continuing to facilitate the adoption of next-generation standardized technologies—enabling industry efficiency, continuity, and growth.”
Here again, VVC may be the secondary motivation for the acquisition. According to IP Watchdog, GE owns 1% of HEVC-related patents, which should already be generating significant revenue. In comparison, VVC licensing is relatively nascent, so significant licensing revenue is a few years off (and far more speculative).
In addition, GE’s VVC portfolio may be smaller than its HEVC-related patents. In this 2021 VVC patent breakdown by IAM, Dolby already owns 1.09% of outstanding VVC-related patents, while GE didn’t make the list, which identifies owners down to 0.18%.
Still, the press release’s focus on next-generation technologies seems to focus more on VVC than HEVC. While it’s tough to say how much VVC played into Dolby’s decision to acquire GE’s portfolio, if I had to guess, I would say it was a very relevant factor.
What’s It Mean?
From my perspective, VVC has been a solution in search of a problem. It hasn’t yet opened any new markets, like H.264 did for HD and HEVC did for 4K. With 8K TVs shunned if not banned in Europe, and of questionable benefit worldwide, there are no obvious markets to conquer.
That said, VVC has been adopted for software playback in China, albeit by VVC IP owners like ByteDance, which limits the endorsement value to some degree. Still, if VVC software playback on mobile works in China and India, perhaps that’s the killer app that could accelerate VVC deployment around the world.
It appears that Dolby thinks so, and perhaps Amazon as well.
Background
VVC (Versatile Video Coding)
Versatile Video Coding (VVC), also known as H.266, ISO/IEC 23090-3, and MPEG-I Part 3, is a video compression standard finalized on 6 July 2020, by the Joint Video Experts Team (JVET), a joint video expert team of the VCEG working group of ITU-T Study Group 16 and the MPEG working group of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29. It is the successor to High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC, also known as ITU-T H.265 and MPEG-H Part 2). It was developed with two primary goals – improved compression performance and support for a very broad range of applications.
VVC / H.266 / MPEG-I Part 3
Versatile video coding
Status In force
Year started 2017
First published 2020
Latest version 3rd Edition
29 September 2023
Organization ITU-T, ISO, IEC
Committee SG16 (Secretary: Simao Campos) (VCEG), MPEG
Base standards H.261, H.262, H.263, H.264, H.265, ISO/IEC 14496-2, MPEG-1
Domain Video compression
License RAND
Website www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-H.266
In October 2015, the MPEG and VCEG formed the Joint Video Exploration Team (JVET) to evaluate available compression technologies and study the requirements for a next-generation video compression standard. The new standard has about 50% better compression rate for the same perceptual quality compared to HEVC,[7] with support for lossless and lossy compression. It supports resolutions ranging from very low resolution up to 4K and 16K as well as 360° videos. VVC supports YCbCr 4:4:4, 4:2:2 and 4:2:0 with 8–10 bits per component, BT.2100 wide color gamut and high dynamic range (HDR) of more than 16 stops (with peak brightness of 1,000, 4,000 and 10,000 nits), auxiliary channels (for depth, transparency, etc.), variable and fractional frame rates from 0 to 120 Hz and higher, scalable video coding for temporal (frame rate), spatial (resolution), SNR, color gamut and dynamic range differences, stereo/multiview coding, panoramic formats, and still-picture coding. Work on high bit depth support (12 to 16 bits per component) started in October 2020[8] and was included in the second edition published in 2022. Encoding complexity of several times (up to ten times) that of HEVC is expected, depending on the quality of the encoding algorithm (which is outside the scope of the standard). The decoding complexity is about twice that of HEVC.
VVC development has been made using the VVC Test Model (VTM), a reference software codebase that was started with a minimal set of coding tools. Further coding tools have been added after being tested in Core Experiments (CEs). Its predecessor was the Joint Exploration Model (JEM), an experimental software codebase that was based on the reference software used for HEVC.
Licensing
To reduce the risk of the problems seen when licensing HEVC implementations, for VVC a new group called the Media Coding Industry Forum (MC-IF) was founded.[15][16] However, MC-IF had no power over the standardization process, which was based on technical merit as determined by consensus decisions of JVET.[17]
Four companies were initially vying to be patent pool administrators for VVC, in a situation similar to the previous AVC[18] and HEVC[19] codecs. Two companies later formed patent pools: Access Advance and MPEG LA (now known as Via-LA).[20]
Access Advance published their licensing fee in April 2021.[21] Via-LA published their licensing fee in January 2022.[22]
Companies known not to be a part of the Access Advance or Via-LA patent pools as of November 2023 are: Apple, Canon, Ericsson, Fraunhofer, Google, Huawei, Humax, Intel, LG, Interdigital, Maxell, Microsoft, Oppo, Qualcomm, Samsung, Sharp and Sony.
Adoption
In 2021 MX Player[23] was reported to deliver content in VVC to up to 20% of its mobile customers..
Software
Encoders/decoders
Fraunhofer HHI released a source-available[Note 1] encoder called VVenC[25] and decoder called VVdeC[26]
Fraunhofer Versatile Video Encoder (VVenC)
Fraunhofer Versatile Video Decoder (VVdeC)
VVC VTM reference software
Tencent Media Lab offers a real time decoder[27] and the Tencent Cloud service offers transcoding and streaming in its cloud infrastructure.[28]
uvg266 open source encoder
ffmpeg starting with version 7.0 supports experimental decoding.[29] Support for RPR[30] and PALETTE[31] is currently missing.[32]
LAV Filters, ffmpeg based DirectShow splitter and decoders for Windows, supports demuxing and decoding starting with version 0.79.[33]
Players
Spin Digital sells a real time decoder and player for Linux and Windows devices.[34]
Elmedia Player added support in July, 2023.[35]
MPC-HC (clsid2’s fork) starting with version 2.2.0.[36]
MPC-BE starting with version 1.7.0.[37]
Zoom Player Steam Edition starting with version v19 beta 6 with the help of LAV Filters v0.79.
Broadcast
The Brazilian SBTVD Forum will adopt the MPEG-I VVC codec in its forthcoming broadcast television system, TV 3.0, expected to launch in 2024. It will be used alongside MPEG-5 LCEVC as a video base layer encoder for broadcast and broadband delivery.[49]
The European organization DVB Project, which governs digital television broadcasting standards, announced 24 February 2022 that VVC was now part of its tools for broadcasting.[50] The DVB tuner specification used throughout Europe, Australia, and many other regions has been revised to support the VVC (H.266) video codec, the successor to HEVC.
MX Player
MX Player is an Indian video streaming and video on demand platform, developed by MX Media & Entertainment. The platform currently operates on an ad-supported model.
In 2018, Times Internet acquired a majority stake in MX Player for $140 million.[1]
In October 2019, MX Player raised $110.8 million in an investment led by Chinese conglomerate Tencent.
In July 2020, MX Player launched the short video app MX TakaTak. As of 24 March 2021, the app has more than 100 million active users.[citation needed] MX Takatak to merge with ShareChat’s Moj to create India’s largest short video platform.