Hangzhou paileyun technology on August 16 officially released the first domestic application in real-time video services low code HD coding engine Pano Venus. This is the first time for the new generation of video coding standard AV1 to be applied in the real-time system in China, replacing the existing mainstream coding standard H.264. It is a new breakthrough in encoding performance and encoding speed, and truly opens the era of real-time video with high picture quality, low bandwidth, high performance and low delay. For the future 4K/8K, panorama, VR and other large-scale application of video technology kicked off.

Recently, Paileyun Audio and video Lab released Pano Venus, the first low-code HD coding engine applied in real-time video services in China. This is the first time that AV1, a new generation of video coding standard, is applied in the real-time system in China. It is used to replace the existing mainstream coding standard H.264. It is a brand new breakthrough in coding technology and truly opens the era of real-time video with high picture quality, low bandwidth, high performance and low delay. For the future 4K/8K, panorama, VR and other large-scale application of video technology kicked off.

Video coding performance and speed of a significant improvement

Pano Venus adopts AV1, the advanced video coding standard. After optimization of algorithm and processor characteristics, the performance has been greatly improved, and the coding delay can be controlled in milliseconds on all platform devices, fully meeting the requirements of real-time video communication. The Pano Venus encoder is also the fastest AV1 encoder known in the country, with an average bandwidth requirement of 40 to 70 percent less than the mainstream H.264 encoding engine for the same video quality.

With the booming development of mobile Internet technology, video data accounts for an increasing proportion of mobile Internet traffic. Live video, video on demand, short video and video chat have been completely integrated into everyone’s life. Video makes us more convenient and quick to obtain a large amount of information, but the transmission and storage of video also face great challenges.

Since the 1990s, video codec technology has been a hot research field at home and abroad. Its main role is to pursue the highest possible video reconstruction quality and compression ratio within the available computing resources, so as to meet the requirements of bandwidth and storage capacity, and ensure high-quality video experience for users.

For real-time audio and video systems, the improvement of video compression rate is helpful to reduce the pressure of Internet lines, save users’ investment in network bandwidth, video storage and other aspects, and also help to provide better picture quality in low bandwidth scenarios.

The AV1 video coding standard adopted by Pano Venus has rich coding tool support, which can greatly improve the compression ratio of video and save a lot of bandwidth. Meanwhile, as the first generation standard developed by the open source media alliance AOM, AV1 not only has very good ecological support, but also provides free patent policy. Compared with h.265 / H.266 and other video standards with unclear intellectual property policies, it has huge advantages. A clear patent policy is also an advantage of AV1 in the industry.

In short, Pano Venus’s technology values focus on two things: dramatically improved coding performance and dramatically improved coding speed.

The first application of low – code HD in real-time video system

According to the different requirements of latency and bandwidth in application scenarios, Paileyun divides the application of video low-code HD technology into three levels:

1. Non-real-time low-code HD: applied to voD scenarios, it has no real-time requirements for coding, low requirements for delay, and high requirements for picture quality and bandwidth.

2. Quasi-real-time low-code HD: it is applied to live video scenes and has high requirements for real-time coding. It is generally run on cloud high-performance servers and has high requirements for picture quality and bandwidth.

3. Real-time low-code HD: applied to real-time audio and video scenes, it has high requirements for real-time coding, usually at the millisecond level. There are a wide variety of operating devices with large performance differences, and it is very difficult to support low-performance devices, with high requirements for picture quality and bandwidth.

At present, the low-code HD video encoding and decoding technology in China is mainly applied to non-real-time and quasi-real-time scenes. The Pano Venus launched by Paileyun is aimed at real-time video service scenes, adopting a new generation of video coding standard AV1.

Due to its high computational complexity, AV1 technology has been applied in voD and other fields, but has not been promoted in real-time audio and video fields.

Pano Venus solves the technical problems of AV1 in the field of real-time audio and video. Through in-depth analysis of the coding tools in AV1 video coding standard, it innovatively proposes a variety of accelerated coding algorithms, enabling it to carry out video communication on various equipment platforms with minimal computing costs and saving a lot of transmission bandwidth. It reduces the delay of video transmission, broadens the application range of AV1, and accelerates the promotion of the next generation of real-time video communication products such as 4K/8K, panorama and VR.

The birth of Pano Venus

Since its establishment in 2019, Bileyun has been investing heavily in the development of AV1 video encoder, aiming to develop a real-time encoder with adaptive encoding complexity adjustment for different coding scenarios, providing ultimate user experience for video conference, social entertainment, cloud games, online education and other real-time scenarios.

With years of deep cultivation in the field of real-time video and pursuit of technical originality, Pano Venus version 1.0 was launched in only two years.

Jiayu Zhao, founder of Bileyun, has 18 years of research and development experience in video conferencing and real-time communication, and served as the U.S. Architect of Cisco’s WebEx. The core technology partners also have several experts in the field of video, with profound technical accumulation in video processing, video compression, video transmission and other fields, and rich experience in video coding and decoding, especially video coding and decoding optimization in real-time communication scenarios.

Pano Venus is the first AV1 video coding engine in China to land on the real-time scene, realizing the bit rate reduction of 40%~70% under the same quality, truly opening the era of real-time video with high picture quality, low bandwidth, high performance and low delay.

For Paileyun, Pano Venus is an important milestone in paileyun’s real-time audio and video technology.

The infinite future is coming.

Paileyun team will continue to promote the in-depth optimization of Pano Venus coding engine, and will also be committed to the application of artificial intelligence in video coding technology, combining the subjective visual characteristics of people, comprehensively improve the video experience of users, and open the next video era.