Unravelling the Power of Single-Pass Look-Ahead in Modern Codecs for optimised transcoding deployment

Winner of the 2024 NAB BEIT Conference Proceedings Best Student Paper Award

Modern video encoders have evolved into sophisticated pieces of software in which various coding tools interact with each other. In the past, single-pass encoding was not considered for Video-On-Demand (VOD) use-cases. In this work, we evaluate production-ready encoders for H.264 (x264), H.265 (HEVC), AV1 (SVT-AV1) along with direct comparisons to the latest AV1 encoder inside NVIDIA GPUs (40 series), and AWS Mediaconvert’s AV1 implementation. Our experimental results demonstrate single pass encoding inside modern encoder implementations can give us very good quality at reasonable compute cost. The results are presented as three different scenarios targeting High, Medium, Low complexity accounting quality-bitrate-compute load. Finally, a set of recommendations are presented for end-users to help decide which encoder/preset combination might be more suited to their use case.

Vibhoothi | Sigmedia Group, Department of Electrical Engineering | Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Julien Zouein | Sigmedia Group, Department of Electrical Engineering | Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
François Pitié | Sigmedia Group, Department of Electrical Engineering | Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Anil Kokaram | Sigmedia Group, Department of Electrical Engineering | Trinity College Dublin, Ireland