It has been less than a year since the first release of the xvc video codec. Now comes the second version of xvc with significant enhancements such as improved compression performance, an LGPL licensing option and a royalty-free baseline profile.

Stockholm, Sweden -- (ReleaseWire) -- 07/03/2018 --The software video compression company Divideon is today making the official release of the second version of xvc. The xvc video codec is a software-defined next-generation video codec specifically developed to provide high compression performance and good visual quality in low-bitrate streaming applications.

The first version of xvc was released in September 2017 and was able to clearly outperform all existing video codecs including HEVC. The second version of xvc delivers even better performance and makes it possible to reduce the bitrate compared to the recently released AV1 codec by between 10% and 20% for the same visual quality.

All of this is made possible with a flexible and modular reference implementation publicly available at GitHub under a dual-licensing scheme; an LGPL license and a commercial license.

The xvc codec is software-defined, which means that conformance for bitstreams, encoders and decoders, is defined in relation to the reference software of xvc. The xvc web page includes information about the the one-stop shop license that is available for the xvc codec, and starting from version 2 of xvc there is now also a royalty-free baseline profile available.

The new version of xvc includes several additional improvements, such as support for multi-threaded encoding, and thanks to xvc's extensible bitstream structure and versioning framework, all version 1 bitstreams are fully compatible and decodable by version 2 decoders.

More information about xvc and Divideon can be found at xvc.io and divideon.com.