Evaluation Of Bitrate Ladders For Versatile Video Coder

Abstract

Many video service providers take advantage of bitrate ladders in adaptive HTTP video streaming to account for different network states and user display specifications by providing bitrate/resolution pairs that best fit client's network conditions and display capabilities. These bitrate ladders, however, differ when using different codecs and thus the couples bitrate/resolution differ as well. In addition, bitrate ladders are based on previously available codecs (H.264/MPEG4-AVC, HEVC, etc.), i.e. codecs that are already in service, hence the introduction of new codecs e.g. Versatile Video Coding (VVC) requires re-analyzing these ladders. For that matter, we will analyze the evolution of the bitrate ladder when using VVC. We show how VVC impacts this ladder when compared to HEVC and H.264/AVC and in particular, that there is no need to switch to lower resolutions at the lower bitrates defined in the Call for Evidence on Transcoding for Network Distributed Video Coding (CfE).