Freely available source code, traces and test content

Freely available source code, traces and test content

• Consumer Digital Video Library (CDVL) Announcement
• New release of H.264/AVC reference software JM 16.2
• Open Source code of an SVC decoder

Consumer Digital Video Library (CDVL) Announcement

CDVL is a digital video library intended for researchers and developers in the fields of video processing and visual quality (both objective and subjective assessment). Progress in these areas have been limited by the availability of high quality royalty-free test material. CDVL provides relevant video clips for different types of video processing and quality measurement applications. This fills a critical industry need.

On Wednesday, November 4, the Consumer Digital Video Library (CDVL) web site (www.cdvl.org) went live. This primary goal of this web site is to provide high quality uncompressed video scenes and subjectively rated videos that may be used freely for research purposes. It is our hope that the new web site will assist industry and standards development efforts in the following areas: conducting subjective video quality tests, developing objective video quality models, improving video coding algorithms, and quantifying video processing algorithm improvements (e.g., video correction, enhancement, and conversion). Registered users may download videos, upload and share their test scenes with other CDVL users, and participate in forum discussions. We invite the VQEG community to consider sharing their research scenes through CDVL.

The new web site is the culmination of 3 years of joint effort by Intel Corporation, the University of California, and NTIA/ITS. NTIA/ITS will maintain the web site and has populated the CDVL with a variety of test scenes from our internal databases. NTIA/ITS plans on adding much more content to CDVL in the near future.

New release of H.264/AVC reference software JM 16.2

H.264/AVC is a standard developed jointly by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) and the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), in the Joint Video Team (JVT). A reference software for H.264/AVC is freely available for download to demonstrate the standard and that its features can be implemented. This is its main purpose; it is not intended as high-performance software for practical use, but it is highly useful for researchers investigating new uses or extensions of the standard. Extensions of particular interest that are made available alongside the AVC reference software are extensions for scalable video coding (SVC) and multiview video coding (MVC).

A new release of the JM reference software for H.264/AVC had been made available at http://iphome.hhi.de/suehring/tml/. This release contains the GOP structure updates that are necessary for generation the low delay anchors. Details can be found in the file jm16.2_changes.doc in the doc directory.

To access the latest developments for the scalable video coding extensions and multiview video coding extensions to the AVC reference software, you can use CVS as follows:

cvs -d :pserver:jvtuser@garcon.ient.rwth-aachen.de:/cvs/jvt login

use the password: jvt.Amd.2

cvs -d :pserver:jvtuser@garcon.ient.rwth-aachen.de:/cvs/jvt co jsvm

cvs -d :pserver:jvtuser@garcon.ient.rwth-aachen.de:/cvs/jvt co jmvm

Open Source code of an SVC decoder

Scalable Video Coding (SVC) is the name given to an extension of the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video compression standard. H.264/MPEG-4 AVC was developed jointly by ITU-T and ISO/IEC JTC 1. These two groups created the Joint Video Team (JVT) to develop the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC standard. The objective of the SVC standardization has been to extend the AVC standard with scalability features allowing easy adaptation of the bit stream to network and terminal constraints.

Mickaël Raulet of IETR/INSA de Rennes announced an opensource SVC decoder library that IETR/INSA has developed. It has been integrated in 2 different opensource players (TCPMP and Mplayer). This decoder was initially designed inside a French national project called scalimages. The source code of this decoding library is available from Sourceforge.

You can find further information at https://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/opensvcdecoder/index.php?title=Main_Page on the installation, features and additional tools related to our SVC decoder library.

The library performance is up to 50 times faster than the JSVM reference software and supports up to 3 dependency layers. A dependency layer represents a specific spatial resolution. The SVC decoder is conformant to the following sequences http://opensvcdecoder.sourceforge.net/JVT-AB023.xls (see IETR conformance entry in this tabular). The entirely decoder is portable over different platforms. It has been tested on x86 architecture, PDA with ARM and xscale processors, and DSP-c64x family processor from Texas Instruments. This decoder will serve as a basis for future development in MPEG RVC (Reconfigurable Video Coding). Anybody who is willing to contribute to the development of this opensource library is welcome.