[x264-devel] CALL FOR CODECS (Submission deadline extended)

[Dmitriy Vatolin]

Dear Developers,

  We sent following invitation to many companies.

  In most companies marketing guys flatly refuse any open comparisons
  (even in situation with partial control - due to real situation with
  codecs), but hope we will find good competitors for strong x264.

  --------------------------------------------

  We are glad to invite you to the Seventh Annual Codec Comparison.

  If you do not stop codec development and improvement (not so rare
  situation, unfortunately) - please contact us.

  For example:
  * It's possible partial participation (only in area, where you codec
    is powerful).
  * It's possible private participation - so results will be published
    only after great marketing department approval.
  * It's possible to participate only with visual comparison (in
    Appendix). So if your codec "tuned only for visual quality" let's
    compare it with leaders visually. It's also possible. You even
    will be able to select frame numbers.
  * It's possible to participate with non H.264 codec also.

  Hope it's clear now that only real leaders in this area will
  participate.

  Tests on pretty last hardware: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 and Intel
  Sandy Bridge also will be included.

  And also we will provide tests using two new metrics with visual
  results better correlation - MS-SSIM and 3-SSIM (and our tests of
  several new metrics including MOVIE on our and others visual test
  bases).

  Please contact us videocodec-testing at graphics.cs.msu.ru

===========================================================================
                    CALL FOR MPEG4-AVC/H.264 CODECS
                  Seventh  H.264 video codec comparison
For practical researchers and developers in the field of high-end video compression
===========================================================================

Scope of Test
-------------

Summary report topics:
* Objective measurements (SSIM, PSNR, MS-SSIM and 3-SSIM in addition and etc.)
* Encoding time
* Averaged objective results analysis
* Leaders in different areas

Important Dates
---------------

Deadlines are extended for 2 weeks!

February, 14    Deadline for receipt of a H.264 codec with required presets
February, 28    Deadline for settling technical problems with codec’s functioning
March, 28       Draft version of report that will be sent to all participants
April, 7        Deadline for reception of comments to the draft
April, 21       Comparison report release


Enhancements in comparison to Previous H.264/AVC Comparison
-----------------------------------------------------------

* Videoconference Encoding Analysis
  Due to the fact that videocoference encoding has some specific that
  is quite different to transcoding tasks we plan to perform special
  analysis for videoconference encoding including:
  * Local encoding quality variation analysis
  * Local bitrate keeping analysis

* New Metrics

  PSNR and even SSIM metrics have no strong correlation to human visual
  perception and for better quality analysis we will use new objective
  quality metrics MS-SSIM and 3-SSIM in addition to classical SSIM and
  PSNR.

* GPU Analysis

  This year we want to add GPU-encoders analysis to the comparison.
  For this analysis we plan to use top GPU, e.g. NVIDIA GeForce GTX
  580. You can send us your GPU-accelerated or GPU-based encoder, but
  if we will receive less than 3 encoders than we will not perform
  this GPU-encoders comparison.

* HRD Compliance

  We consider the possibility to perform HRD compliance test for video
  codecs that support this feature.

* Transcoding Analysis

  Also we want to propose developers to take part in special
  additional testing mode - transcoding analysis. You send us a pair
  (MPEG-2 decoder + H.264 encoder) and we will test it for transcoding
  use-case we will take MPEG-2 source video sequecnes to encode them
  with H.264 encoder.


Developer Deliverables
----------------------

The following deliverables should be provided by each developer:
* Codec files (CLI executable file is preferable)
* Short description of codec parameters
* Codec's presets with mentioning what H.264/AVC profiles are used

The full text of Call for Codecs is available at
http://compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/call_for_codecs_11.html


Useful Links
------------

* CALL FOR CODECS-2011
  http://compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/call_for_codecs_11.html

* Previous Video Codec Comparison - 2010
  http://www.compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/h264_2010/

* Options Analysis of MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 Codec x264
  http://compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/x264_options_analysis_08_en.html

 Please contact us videocodec-testing at graphics.cs.msu.ru

Sincerely yours,
 Dr. Vatolin