This week’s lesson is an updated lesson for my course, Computing and Using Video Quality Metrics: A Course for Encoding Professionals. The agenda is shown in the YouTube frame.

The lesson starts with an overview of rate-distortion curves and BD-Rate functions, what they are, and how you create them. Then I get into a pet peeve; academic codec comparisons vs. real-world comparisons. Ever wonder why so many academic comparisons found that AV1 produced about the same quality as HEVC while real-world studies find AV1 significantly better? Here’s your answer.

Note that you should review all projections for VVC and EVC with some degree of skepticism. Why? Because part of both licensing structures includes the ability to remove encoding tools from some profiles to simplify licensing. So, if one company doesn’t want to license their IP at a reasonable rate, the MC-IF can create a profile that excludes that IP and move on (see here). As far as I can tell, most early quality comparisons with the VVC reference codec use all tools in the spec. However, we won’t know which tools are in or out until licensing is set, which is at least 3 – 12 months away for VVC, possibly longer for EVC.