Overview
Scalable Video Technology (SVT) is a software-based video coding technology that is highly optimized for Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors and Intel® Xeon® D processors. Using the open source SVT encoder core found on this website, it is possible to spread video encoding processing across multiple Intel® Xeon® processors. With many data centers using Intel® Xeon® processors, a real advantage of processing efficiency can be achieved by using a combination of SVT video encoders and Intel® Xeon® processors. The large core count available on modern processors (e.g. up to 56 cores per dual-socket platform) makes it possible to scale the performance of SVT encoders extremely well as a function of the available computational resources.
Project Goals
The objective of the open source Scalable Video Technology (SVT) project is to provide flexible high-performance software encoder core libraries for media and visual cloud developers. Such libraries will accelerate innovation of new visual cloud services, serving as a starting point for developers to build faster and higher-quality full-feature encoder products. SVT is designed for cloud-native scalability, and it provides outstanding tradeoffs between visual quality and performance, for both VOD and live visual cloud applications. SVT encoders are made available to the open source community via open source licenses, allowing adopters to reduce the time-to-market and cost-of-ownership of each of their SVT-enabled cloud video transcoding solutions.
Scalable Video Technology and the Open Visual Cloud
The Open Visual Cloud is an open source project that offers a set of pre-defined reference pipelines for various target visual cloud use cases. These reference pipelines are based on optimized open source ingredients across four core building blocks (encode, decode, inference, and render), which are used to deliver visual cloud services.
Scalable Video Technology is a major component of the Open Visual Cloud and plays a key role in all the Open Visual Cloud Services workflow pipelines. To read more about the Open Visual Cloud and the opportunities for developers, visit the Open Visual Cloud home page.
How it Works
Scalable Video Technology (SVT) is a software-based video coding technology that allows encoders on any x86 CPU to achieve the best-possible tradeoffs between performance, latency and visual quality. SVT also facilitates performance level scaling of encoders, given the quality and latency requirements of the target applications. The efficiency and scalability of SVT are supported through mainly architectural and algorithmic features, and also via specific optimizations for Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors and Intel® Xeon® D processors.
The SVT architecture provides multi-precision-level features like human visual system (HVS) optimized classification resulting in better rate/quality tradeoffs, and Intel® Xeon® processor-specific performance tuning.
Three modes are available:
- Visual Mode (Tune 0): Optimized for visual quality
- PSNR/SSIM Mode (Tune 1): Default encoder mode; Optimized to maximize the PSNR/SSIM BDRate performance
- VMAF Mode (Tune 2): Optimized to maximize VMAF BDRate performance
In addition, up to thirteen presets: M0-M12, provide fine granularity in the selection of the tradeoffs between quality and speed.
SVT architecture is CODEC standard-agnostic, i.e., it can be applied for the development of encoders that are compliant with different standards. Intel has created an open source SVT-HEVC and SVT-VP9 encoder core for developers to use in creating their own products and services. The SVT-HEVC encoder cores are made available to the open source community via a highly-permissive OSI approved BSD+Patent license. The same architectural advantages are available in SVT-AV1 and any other future SVT CODECs.
SVT CODECs
SVT-HEVC
The SVT-HEVC encoder core supports HEVC Main and Main10 profiles (up to Level 6.2) and video input resolutions up to 8Kp60, 4:2:0, 8-bit and 10-bit. The SVT-HEVC encoder was first released to the Open Source community in September of 2018.
SVT-AV1
The SVT-AV1 encoder core was developed based on the same standard-agnostic SVT architecture, while also using many of the features of the open source AOMedia (AOM) Video 1 (AV1) encoder. The SVT-AV1 encoder core supports video input resolutions up to 4Kp60, 4:2:0, 8-bit and 10-bit (HDR), The SVT-AV1 encoder core was released to open source on January 31, 2019. In August of 2020, the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) announced the formation of the AOMedia Software Implementation Working Group (SIWG), a member-driven initiative to aid the development of AOMedia AV1 products and services.
SVT-VP9
The SVT-VP9 Encoder is a VP9-compliant encoder library core. The SVT-VP9 Encoder is being optimized to achieve excellent performance levels currently supporting 10 density-quality presets on a system with a dual Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor targeting real-time encoding of up to two 4Kp60 streams on the Gold 6140 with M8. The SVT-VP9 encoder core was released to open source on February 15, 2019.
SVT-AVS3
AVS3 video coding is a third-generation standard developed by China AVS working group. It is designed to adapt multiple application scenarios, such as UHD TV broadcasting, VR and video surveillance.
SVT-AVS3 is Intel's adoption of the standard, based on Scalable Video Technology (SVT) architecture. The result is an optimal trade-off among coding performance, encoding speed, and visual quality. SVT-AVS3 addresses multidimensional parallelism and perceptual based rate-distortion optimization.
Intel has partnered with Beijing Boyaruishi Technology Co., Ltd (Boya) to support a SVT based AVS3 solution which is licensed through Boya 新版SVT-AVS3发布 编码效率提升并提供更灵活的编码工具 (qq.com).
News & Announcements
- AOMedia adopts svt-av1 encoder
- SVT-AV1-Enabled Mainconcept SDK Allows OTT Access to More Browsers and Mobile Devices than Ever Before
Learn More
Whitepapers
- Scalable Video Technology for the Visual Cloud with AWS
- Scalable Video Technology for the Visual Cloud with Azure
- Rethinking Visual Cloud Workload Distribution