Welcome Kvazaar HEVC encoder!

I stumbled upon this promising encoder yesterday.

The purpose of this academic open-source project is to develop a video encoder for the emerging High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard. This Kvazaar HEVC encoder is being developed towards the following goals:

  1. Coding efficiency close to HEVC reference encoder (HM)
  2. Modular encoder structure to simplify its data flow modeling
  3. Efficient support for different parallelization approaches
  4. Easy portability to different platforms
  5. Optimized encoding speed without sacrificing its coding efficiency, modularity, or portability
  6. Reduced computation and memory resources without sacrificing its coding efficiency, modularity, or portability
  7. Excellent software readability and implementation documentation

Achieving these objectives requires encoder with design decisions that make this open-source encoder unique:

  1. The encoder is developed from the scratch (HM used as a reference)
  2. The implementation language is platform-independent C

The source codes of the Kvazaar HEVC encoder, its latest version, and issue tracker are available in
GitHub (https://github.com/ultravideo)
under the GNU GPLv2 license. The features of the latest encoder version and upcoming milestones are listed in the feature roadmap below. Currently, the supported platforms are x86 and x64 on Windows and Linux but we might add other platforms in the future.
Statistics of the code repository can be found from Ohloh.

New contributors

New ambitious developers from academia, industry, and other sectors are warmly invited to make contributions, report bugs, and give feedback. We do not ask contributors to give up copyright to their work. Active contributors will also be considered when filling open positions in Ultra Video group.

You may contact us by email (ultravideo at cs dot tut dot fi), GitHub, or via IRC at #kvazaar_hevc in FreeNode IRC network.

It looks promising, the code is mostly clean (even if I’m not fond of 2 spaces indentation) and from the early interaction on irc the people seem nice.

They use git and they code in plain C + YASM to boot (I decided to let other look at x265 since they use mercurial, that I dislike and C++ that I loathe and so quite a number of other people I happen to know).

The project is at its early stage but they have a good roadmap and hopefully they’ll mold their API so it gets supported by other projects (why x264 is widely used and libvpx a little less? because the codecs implemented are less good? Not at all! Just because the API is much worse to use!).

edit: It landed in Libav 12!

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