uvgKvazaarHW: Open-Source Hardware HEVC Intra Encoder
Panu Sjövall, Guillaume Gautier, Alexandre Mercat, Jarno Vanne · 2025
The widespread deployment of modern video coding technologies calls for efficient implementations that are made available to the entire video coding community.This paper presents the first known open-source hardware (HW) encoder implementation for High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC/H.265).Our encoder, named uvgKvazaarHW, is developed from the Kvazaar open-source software encoder.The current version of uvgKvazaarHW supports all normative HEVC intra coding tools with previously proven real-time encoding speed of up to 4K resolution on an Arria10 PCIe FPGA.It is implemented using High-level Synthesis (HLS) tool called Catapult.The open-source Kactus2 tool has been used to create component descriptions that follow the IP-XACT standard for better modularity, reusability, and downstream integration.The open-source repository of uvgKvazaarHW includes HLS synthesis-ready source codes and a SystemC simulation framework using Verilator for validation and development.