Content adaptive live encoding with open source codecs
Pradeep Ramachandran, Yang Shushuang, Praveen Tiwari, Gopi Satykrishna Akisetty · 2020
The landscape of video codecs used by broadcasters for their streaming solutions is constantly evolving. This evolution is resulting in increasingly complex codecs forcing broadcasters to consider solutions based on software codecs, as opposed to those based on hardware codecs, owing to the increased flexibility. Additionally, open-source software encoders for the popular AVC (x264), and emerging HEVC (x265) standards are now sufficiently robust for broadcasters to seriously consider using them for deployment. However, both these encoders, in their stock implementation, use a single set of encoder settings for a given stream without adapting the encoder dynamically to the incoming content. Without this ability, the encoder would have to be configured with conservative settings to sustain the target frame rate, resulting in inefficient encodes that either consume more bits than intended for the given quality, or achieve lower quality than possible for the given bitrate.