Effective and smooth video communication has become an integral tool for interaction in our modern society. The well-known WebRTC project is optimized for server-based communication architectures with less stringent latency requirements. This paper introduces an open-source, peer-to-peer (P2P) mesh-based application called uvgComm 1.0 for low-latency multi-party video communication. Our experimental results show that uvgComm attains 25% lower latency than server-based solutions at 219 ms. In addition, it offers advanced privacy protection mechanisms with end-to-end encryption and P2P mesh topology that delivers media without any media servers. The ambitious goal of uvgComm is to take P2P mesh-based conferencing architecture to the next level and make this architecture a serious competitor to server-based communication architectures.

Low-latency volumetric video transport is a key enabling technology for more immersive communication applications. This paper presents the latest release of our open-source Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) library called uvgRTP 3.0 that has been upgraded to support Visual Volumetric Video-based Coding (V3C) transmission in Video-based Point Cloud Compression (V-PCC) and MPEG Immersive Video (MIV) formats. uvgRTP 3.0 introduces 1) the V3C atlas RTP payload format; 2) two multiplexing methods to reduce port reservations during V3C transmission; and 3) improved packet reception with multithreading. Our performance results show that uvgRTP 3.0 can encrypt and transmit V3C bitstreams at 106 Mbit/s, with CPU core utilization of 26%, and achieving a round-trip latency of 2 ms in a local area network. The support for high-speed, encrypted V3C communication with the permissive BSD-license make uvgRTP 3.0 a potential transmission library for any industrial or academic volumetric communication system.

Information security has become a key success factor for streaming media applications that are increasingly vulnerable to wiretapping, message forgery, data tampering, hacking, and other possible cyberattacks. This paper addresses the existing security risks in real-time video streaming by introducing a new security extension to our uvgRTP opensource Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) library. The proposed solution improves content integrity and privacy by adopting Secure RTP (SRTP) and Zimmermann RTP (ZRTP) for media End-to-End Encryption (E2EE). These new security mechanisms make uvgRTP the first open-source library that supports on-the-fly encrypted AVC, HEVC, and VVC video streaming. Our performance results on Intel Core i7-4770 processor show that uvgRTP is able to transport encrypted 8K VVC video at up to 187 fps and 8K HEVC video at up to 120 fps over a 10 Gbps Local Area Network (LAN). The achieved transfer rate for encrypted HEVC video is 50% higher and latency 86% lower than the respective performance values of FFmpeg in unencrypted HEVC streaming. These top streaming speed results with state-of-the-art video codec support, advanced encryption mechanisms, and the permissive BSD license make uvgRTP an attractive solution for a broad range of commercial and academic streaming media applications.

This paper presents an interactive demonstration setup, which allows users to configure the video coding parameters of Kvazzup open-source video call software at runtime and evaluate their impact on Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE). The demonstration is carried out by implementing a new Kvazzup control panel for video call parameterization and visual quality, bit rate, latency, and frame rate evaluation.

Efficient transport technologies for High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) are key enablers for economic 4K video transmission in current telecommunication networks. This paper introduces a novel open-source Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) library called uvgRTP for high-speed 4K HEVC video streaming. Our library supports the latest RFC 3550 specification for RTP and an associated RFC 7798 RTP payload format for HEVC. It is written in C++ under a permissive 2-clause BSD license and it can be run on both Linux and Windows operating systems with a user-friendly interface. Our experiments on an Intel Core i7-4770 CPU show that uvgRTP is able to stream HEVC video at 5.0 Gb/s over a local 10 Gb/s network. It attains 4.4 times as high peak goodput and 92.1% lower latency than the state-of-the-art FFmpeg multimedia framework. It also outperforms LIVE555 with over double the goodput and 82.3% lower latency. These results indicate that uvgRTP is currently the fastest open-source RTP library for 4K HEVC video streaming.

The ability to record vast amounts of video content requires convenient and efficient video coding services with which users can tackle the limited storage and transmission capacities. This paper presents an open-source cloud service for encoding raw video formats and transcoding compressed videos to the latest HEVC/H.265 format. Respective commercial transcoding services are available on the Internet but they are behind a paywall. On the other hand, using command-line interfaces of existing open-source software solutions requires in-depth knowledge of the coding process to attain the best coding gain and speed. The proposed service is available online, it is free to use without any registration, and its easy-to-use web interface makes it feasible for non-technical users. It is built on the FFmpeg multimedia framework whose built-in decoders accept various input video formats that are then compressed to HEVC with a full-fledged Kvazaar open-source encoder.

This paper describes a demonstration setup for an end-to-end 4K video call with Kvazzup open-source HEVC video call application. The Kvazzup clients are installed on a desktop and a laptop computer powered by Intel 22-core Xeon and Intel 4-core i7 processors, respectively. The proposed two-way peer-to-peer video call setup is shown to support 2160p30 video stream from the desktop to the laptop and 720p30 stream in the reverse direction.

This paper introduces an open-source HEVC video call application called Kvazzup. This academic proposal is the first HEVC-based end-to-end video call system with a user-friendly Graphical User Interface for call management. Kvazzup is built on the Qt framework and it makes use of four open-source tools: Kvazaar for HEVC encoding, OpenHEVC for HEVC decoding, Opus codec for audio coding, and Live555 for managing RTP/RTCP traffic. In our experiments, Kvazzup is prototyped with low-complexity VGA and high-quality 720p video calls between two desktops. On an Intel 4-core i5 processor, the VGA call accounts for 17% of the total CPU time. Averagely, it requires a bit rate of 0.31 Mbit/s out of which 0.26 Mbit/s is taken by video and 0.05 Mbit/s by audio. In the 720p call, the respective figures are 46%, 1.13 Mbit/s, 1.08 Mbit/s, and 0.05 Mbit/s. These test cases also validate the feasibility of HEVC in different types of video calls. HEVC coding is shown to account for around 34% of the Kvazzup processing time in the VGA call and 45% in the 720p call.

This paper proposes to use RTP (Real-time Transport Protocol) Reception Hint Tracks for convenient recording and playback of a video call in MP4 format. The feasibility of RTP Reception Hint Tracks is validated as a part of an implemented end-to-end video call system. The proposed approach records a bidirectional Linphone video call and multiplexes it as MP4 RTP Reception Hint Tracks with the L-SMASH software library. It also stores RTCP (RTP Control Protocol) Reception Hint Tracks for additional timing information. Playback of the MP4 file is performed with VLC Media Player that is made compatible with RTP Reception Hint Tracks. The proposed proof-of-concept setup meets particularly well the needs of multi-codec solutions where different audio and video codecs can be used for a video call recording and playback. According to our analysis, recording RTP reception Hint Tracks increases the Linphone CPU time by under 1% and the bitrate by under 2% over the bare bitrate of the recorded RTP packets.