September 14, 2021
© Fraunhofer HHI
The "Fraunhofer Versatile Video Encoder " (VVenC) software developed by Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI) won first place at the "Best Open Source Project Awards". Award winners were announced during this year's IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME). VVenC is a fast and efficient encoder implementation of the video coding standard H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC) released last year. The VVenC open source project was realized by a research team from Fraunhofer HHI’s "Video Communication and Applications"department under the leadership of Adam Wieckowski.
The "Best Open Source Project Awards" were presented on July 8, 2021 as part of the "Open Source Competitions" during this year's virtual ICME. VVenC prevailed against eleven other competing projects and was nominated first place. ICME is one of the leading conferences in the field of multimedia. Researchers from all over the world exchange information on multimedia technologies, systems and applications. "The award for the best open source project is a well-deserved recognition for our entire team and a great motivation for us to continue improving VVenC," said Benjamin Bross, Head of “Video Coding Systems” group at Fraunhofer HHI.
The award-winning VVenC software takes full advantage of H.266/VVC’s ability to reduce the amount of data needed to transmit video. At the same time, the software is easy to integrate into existing multimedia applications. VVenC can be flexibly configured according to different quality and time requirements.
The software is available free of charge to research groups and development teams and serves as a basis to develop VVC-based services and products. Thus, traditional video applications such as streaming can be made much more efficient. Moreover, emerging applications for virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) can be decisively advanced. "With the freely accessible software VVenC it is our goal to support a fast implementation of the new, international video codec VVC and make it as easy as possible for interested market participants to enter into product development," commented Dr.-Ing. Thomas Schierl, Head of “Video Communication and Applications” department at Fraunhofer HHI.
In addition to Adam Wieckowski, the VVenC team at Fraunhofer HHI consisted of Jens Brandenburg, Tobias Hinz, Christian Bartnik, Valeri George, Gabriel Hege, Dr. Christian R. Helmrich, Anastasia Henkel, Christian Lehmann, Christian Stoffers and, Ph.D. Ivan Zupancic, under the leadership of Benjamin Bross, Dr. Thomas Schierl and Dr. Detlev Marpe.
VVenC is publicly available on GitHub .