Video Codec Analysis and Testing

Moscow State University (MSU) Graphics & Media Laboratory has more than 10 years of experience in video and image processing, including compression algorithms and methods. One of our research directions is video codec analysis — we have prepared more than 25 video codec analysis reports, including public and private reports.

We can provide several types of collaboration in area of codec comparison for codec developers companies, and for encoding solutions users and professionals. Typical use-case for that work is — codec development company or codec user want to analyse encoding quality of its encoder and to compare it with the competitive solutions.

Private Codec Comparison

You send us codec with chosen presets and we will perform codecs comparison for you. The result will be similar for our public comparison, like MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 Video Codecs Comparison but much more analysis, pages and graphs as in Enterprise Edition of the comparison.

There are many pre-defined variants of this analysis type. Deatiled information could be found at Private Codec comparison page.

This is a most cheap and easy way for collaboration. Price for such work depends on number of codecs/presets, sequences and etc.

Software Solutions for Internal Codec Testing

There is a common task to analyze a video codec to assess its quality, quality of its functions. For example such a task appears when developing a new codec or tuning an already developed one. Such tasks commonly are solved by manual or semiautomatic testing systems and often these systems have not a sufficient number of functions for complete analysis.

We propose two software systems to help you test and analyze codecs and algorithms

MSU VQMT - Video Quality Metric Tool

Main use-case of MSU VQMT is to compare video sequences using objective quality metrics. Main features of proposed system are:

• Support of most popular file formats: AVI, YUV, MOV, MP4,…
• Support of many popular video quality metrics: PSNR, MSE, SSIM, VQM, …
• Graphic user and command-line interfaces
• Plug-ins support

See VQMT page for more information.

Another Codec Analysis and Tuning Tasks

We perform independent codec estimation comparing to other codecs for different use-cases, as described above, but also could make next tasks:

Strong and Weak Points of Your Codec

• Deep encoder parts analysis (ME, RC on GOP, mode decision, etc).
• Weak and strong points for your encoder and complete information about encoding quality on different content types.
• Encoding Quality improvement by the pre and post filtering (including technologies licensing).

Encoder Features Implementation Optimality Analysis

We perform encoder features effectiveness (speed/quality trade-off) analysis that could lead up to 30% increase for speed/quality characteristics of your codec. We can help you to tune your codec and find best encoding parameters. One example of this analysis type is x264 Codec Strong and Weak Points analysis.

Contacts

E-mail: videocodec-testing@graphics.cs.msu.ru