Versatile Video Coding (H.266/VVC) was standardized in July 2020, around seven years after its predecessor, High Efficiency Video Coding (H.265/HEVC). Typical for a successor standard, VVC aims to offer 50% bitrate savings at similar visual quality, which was confirmed in official verification tests. While HEVC provided large compression efficiency improvements over Advanced Video Coding (H.264/AVC), fast development of video technology ecosystem required more in terms of functionality. This resulted in various amendments being specified for HEVC including screen content, scalability and 3D-video extensions, which fragmented the HEVC market, rendering only the base specification being widely supported across a wide range of devices. To mitigate this, the VVC standard was from the start designed with versatile use cases in mind, and provides wide-spread support already in the first version. Shortly after the finalization of VVC, an open optimized encoder implementation VVenC was published, aiming to provide the potential of VVC at shorter runtime than the VVC reference software VTM. VVenC also supports additional features like multi-threading, rate control and subjective quality optimizations. While the software is optimized for random-access high-resolution video encoding, it can be configured to be used in alternative use cases. This paper discusses the performance of VVenC beyond its main use case, using different configurations and content types. Application specific performance is also discussed. It is shown that VVenC can mostly match VTM performance with less computation, and provides attractive additional faster working points with bitrate reduction tradeoffs.
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