NEWS
ANNOUNCEMENTS / July 2, 2025
Spin Digital and Fraunhofer HHI present ultra-low latency VVC encoding at MPEG meeting in Korea.
Spin Digital Labs and Fraunhofer HHI presented a demo of ultra-low latency HEVC and VVC encoding at the MPEG 151 meeting in Daejeon, South Korea, on July 2nd 2025.
Summary
- Spin Digital and Fraunhofer HHI showed a demo of ultra-low latency HEVC and VVC encoding at the MPEG 151 meeting.
- The demo highlighted optimized VVC and HEVC software encoders and decoders optimized for ultra-low latency applications such as real-time communication, remote control, cloud gaming, and broadcast contribution.
- Spin Digital’s live encoder (Spin Enc Live) now has all the features needed for real-time applications: ultra-low latency mode, advanced rate control, and gradual decoder refresh (GDR).
- The encoder can run on small mini PCs and still handle 4K in real-time.
- The demo showcased two encoders running at the same time, one for HEVC and one for VVC, both at 500 Kbit/s encoding a 4Kp30 webcam feed. Each encoder got 7 cores on a mini-PC with a 16-core AMD Ryzen processor.
- Spin Player with HEVC and VVC decoding and low-latency rendering was used for side-by-side playback.
- The encoding latency was 18 ms, decoding latency was 8.1 ms, the end-to-end latency 160 ms.
- The main takeaway? VVC looks clearly better than HEVC at the same low bitrate with the same computing resources and in a resource contrained MiniPC.
MPEG 151th and JVET 39th meetings
The MPEG 151 meeting, colocated with the 39th meeting of the ITU-T/ISO/IEC Joint Video Experts Team (JVET), is the main gathering of video coding experts working in the development of video coding standards whch includes HEVC/H.265, VVC/H.266, and next-generation video coding beyond VVC.
A document describing the demo is available from the JVET website: Ultra-low latency demo: Ressource-constrained VVC and HEVC software encoding up to 4K
Demo Description
In this demo Spin Digital and Fraunhofer HHI presented an optimized VVC and HEVC software encoder and decoder for ultra-low latency. Ultra-low latency encoding and decoding is needed in several applications such as real-time communication, remote monitoring and control, interactive services (e.g. cloud gaming and remote desktop), and broadcast contribution.
Spin Digital live encoder (Spin Enc Live) has been extended with a new operation mode for ultra-low latency, and includes all the required features for the target use cases including state-the-art rate control, HRD buffer model, and gradual decoder intra refresh (GDR). It supports both HEVC and VVC and includes a complete framework for real-time applications with input capture, video filtering, encoding and streaming.
In addition, the encoder is able to run on resource constrained platforms with small form factor and low power, and is able to operate in real-time under those conditions up to 4K resolution.
The demonstration showcases an end-to-end application for ultra-low latency, including webcam capture, encoding, streaming, decoding and playback. For the demo purposes two synchronised encoders encode a 4Kp30 webcam video live stream. One encoder instance encodes HEVC and the other one encodes VVC video, each one of them at 500 Kbit/s with CBR. Each encoder is assigned with 7 cores (14 threads) on a Mini-PC with a 16 core AMD Ryzen 9 9950x processor. On the decoder side the two streams are decoded and played simultaneously side-by-side, using Spin Digital’s player Spin Player, allowing a direct quality comparison between HEVC and VVC.
The end-to-end latency was measured using a combination of timestamps with a stopwatch and instrumentation of the encoder and decoder programs. The main results are:
- End-to-end latency: 160 ms
- Encoding only latency: 18 ms
- Decoding only latency: 8.1 ms
The demo clearly shows that the VVC video quality is better than the HEVC video quality for the same low bit rate when both encoders are given the same amount of computing resources.
The demo highlights the usability of VVC for ultra-low latency use cases in resource constraint environments. Ultra-low latency VVC encoding delivers higher quality video, including higher resolution and higher perceived quality at lower bitrates, compared to HEVC (and older codecs). A highly optimized implementation shows that both encoding and decoding can be performed in resource constrained computing platforms, enabling the use of VVC in more applications and use cases.
More information
- Download the demo description document from JVET
- More details about Spin Digital products: encoder, player, SDK are available