____   ____._______   ____._______________________                        
\   \ /   /|   \   \ /   /|   \_   ___ \__    ___/    .__         .__     
 \   Y   / |   |\   Y   / |   /    \  \/ |    |     __|  |___   __|  |___ 
  \     /  |   | \     /  |   \     \____|    |    /__    __/  /__    __/ 
   \___/   |___|  \___/   |___|\______  /|____|       |__|        |__|    
                                      \/
     VIVICT VIDEO COMPARISON TOOL ++

An easy to use tool for subjective comparison of the visual quality of different encodings of the same video source.

(Screenshot contains images from Tears Of Steel, (CC) Blender Foundation, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution License )

Vivict++ is a sibling to vivict. Vivict++ is not limited by browser support for different video format and codecs, and therefore, it is able to support a much wider range of formats and codecs, due to the power of the FFmpeg libav*libraries. Basically, Vivict++ supports any format/codec supported by ffmpeg.

Note that this software is in an alpha state. Bugs can be expected, the code is not as clean as one would wish etc. See known issues

Installation

Snap

sudo snap install vivictpp

or alternatively, to install from edge channel,

sudo snap install --edge vivictpp

Note that due to snap security features, vivictpp will only be able to access files in your home folder when installed from snap. Connecting the vivictpp snap to the systems removable-media slot will allow also accessing files in location under /mnt and /media. The below command can be used for this.

sudo snap connect vivictpp:removable-media :removable-media

Homebrew

Note: In some cases it may be necessary to install python@3.12 manually before installing vivictpp. This can be done with brew install --overwrite python@3.12.

brew tap vivictorg/vivictpp
brew install vivictpp

Windows installer

Note: On windows, Vivict++ requires Microsoft Visual C++ runtime libraries to function. If you don't already have them installed, download and install the latest version from here

To install Vivict++, download and run the installer from the latest release

You can also download the installer from a prerelase if you want to try out the latest unreleased features.

Building

Ubuntu

1. Install dependencies

$ apt-get --fix-missing install -y cmake python3-pip gcc python3-setuptools \
  python3-wheel libfreetype6-dev libavformat-dev libavcodec-dev \
  libavfilter-dev libswscale-dev pkg-config

$ pip3 install ninja meson

2. Create meson builddir

$ meson -Duse_sdl2_subproject=true builddir

(Setting the use_sdl2_subproject option will cause meson to build sdl2 and sdl2_ttf as subprojects. This is recomended on ubuntu since the sdl2 version provided by ubuntu is not the most recent one)

3. Compile

$ meson compile -C builddir

4. The vivictpp executable should now be available in builddir

MacOS

1. Install dependencies

Installing vivictpp from brew should install the necessary dependencies.

$ brew tap vivictorg/vivictpp
$ brew install vivictpp

2. Create meson builddir

$ meson  builddir

3. Compile

$ meson compile -C builddir

4. The vivictpp executable should now be available in builddir

Windows

This has been tested on windows 11

1. Follow the guide here to install meson and the Visual Studio toolchain
2. Create a folder for dependencies inside the vivictpp repository folder

mkdir winlibs

3. Download the following archives and extract them to the winlibs folder

• https://libsdl.org/release/SDL2-devel-2.26.5-VC.zip
• https://www.libsdl.org/projects/SDL_ttf/release/SDL2_ttf-devel-2.20.2-VC.zip
• https://github.com/GyanD/codexffmpeg/releases/download/5.1.2/ffmpeg-5.1.2-full_build-shared.7z

4. Create meson builddir

meson setup builddir

5. Compile

meson compile -C builddir

6. vivctpp.exe is now available in builddir. Note that you will need to add directories containing all dlls to path to be able to execute it.

PATH=%PATH%;<VIVICTPPDIR>\winlibs\SDL2-2.26.5\lib\x64;<VIVICTPPDIR>\winlibs\SDL2_ttf-2.20.2\lib\x64;<VIVICTPPDIR>\winlibs\ffmpeg-5.1.2-full_build-shared\lib

Usage

Run with the -h flag to see the commandline options

> vivictpp -h
Vivict++ - Vivict Video Comparison Tool ++
Usage: ./build/vivictpp [OPTIONS] leftVideo [rightVideo]

Positionals:
  leftVideo TEXT REQUIRED     Path or url to first (left) video
  rightVideo TEXT             Path or url to second (right) video

Options:
  -h,--help                   Print this help message and exit
  --left-filter TEXT          Video filters for left video
  --right-filter TEXT         Video filters for left video
  --left-format TEXT          Format options for left video input
  --right-format TEXT         Format options for right video input
  --hwaccel TEXT              Select device type to use for hardware accelerated decoding. Valid values are:
                                auto    Use any available device type (default)
                                none    Disable hardware accelerated decoding
                                TYPE    Name of devicetype, see https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/HWAccelIntro
  --preferred-decoders TEXT   Comma separated list of decoders that should be preferred over default decoder when applicable


KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS

SPACE  Play/Pause video
,      Step forward 1 frame
.      Step backward 1 frame
/ or - Seek forward 5 seconds
m      Seek backward 5 seconds
?      Seek Forward 60s
M      Seek backward 60s
Alt-?  Seek Forward 10min
Alt-M  Seek Backward 10min
<      Decrease left frame offset
>      Increase left frame offset
[      Decrease playback speed
]      Increase playback speed

f      Toggle full screen
u      Zoom in
i      Zoom out
0      Reset pan and zoom to default
s      Toggle scale content to fit window
t      Toggle visibility of time
d      Toggle visibility of Stream and Frame metadata

q      Quit application

See also  https://github.com/vivictorg/vivictpp#readme

Vivict++ 0.3.1

To visually compare two videos in files (or urls) VIDEO1 and VIDEO2 respectively:

> vivictpp VIDEO1 VIDEO2

Vivict++ can also be run with only one video

> vivictpp VIDEO1

Controlling playback and view using the mouse

• The split line is controlled by simply moving the mouse left and right
• Panning is done by left clicking and dragging
• Left clicking anywhere starts/stops the playback

Using video filters

The --left-filter and --right-filter options can be used to specify ffmpeg filters that are applied to the input(s) before being displayed. The filters should be specified using ffmpeg filter syntax, see FFmpeg Filters Documentation

For example, to compare an interlaced source with a transcoded and deinterlaced variant, the below command could be used

> vivictpp --left-filter yadif SOURCEVIDEO TRANSCODEDVIDEO

Hardware accelerated decoding

There are two kind of hardware accelerated decoders in ffmpeg/libav, internal hwaccel decoders and external wrapper decoders. Vivict++ has support for both. Use of nternal hardware accelerated decoders are controlled by the hardware acceleration settings described in this section. To use external wrapper decoders, use the Preferred decoders section below.

To use libav internal hwaccel decoders, hardware acceleration can be enabled in the Settings dialog (File->Settings). Each supported hardware acceleration method can be enabled/disabled individually.

It is also possible to control use of hardware acceleration from the 'Open file' dialog. The 'hardware acceleration' combox allows for selecting options auto (use default hardware acceleration as configured in settings), none (use no hardware acceleration), or selecting a specific supported hardware acceleration method.

On the commandline, the --hwaccel option can be used to control hardware acceleration for files specified on the commandline.

For more info on harware accelerating decoding, see https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/HWAccelIntro .

Note that even with hardware accelerated decoding, depending of the format of the source video, vivict++ might still use quite a bit of cpu to do pixel format conversion since (for now) vivictpp only support 8bit yuv output. With cuda or vaapi hardware acceleration the necessary pixel format conversion may be done on the gpu.

Specify preferred decoder

In some cases it might be preferable to use a different decoder than the libav default. For instance, libopenjpeg may give better performance than libav's native jpeg2000 decoder, and one may want to use hevc_cuvid instead of the x265 decoder.

The settings dialog allows configuration of an order list of decoders that should be preferred when they are applicable. The first, if any, of the listed preferred codecs that is aplicable for the input will be used for decoding. Non-applicable codecs will simply be ignored, if none of the preferred decoders can be used vivictpp will try to find some other applicable decoder.

A comma separated list of preferred codecs can be specified on the commandline with the --preferred-decoders option, this list of decoders will be used only for files also specified on the commandline.

For instance, to use cuvid decoders for h264 and h265, and libopenjpeg for jpeg 2000 input, one would call vivictpp like below.

vivictpp --preferred-decoders h264_cuvid,hevc_cuvid,libopenjpeg video.mp4

Displaying video quality (VMAF) data

Note that this functionality is currently not available in the new imgui UI. It mayb be reinstated in the future.

Specifying input format

In case your input file is in a format this not easily identified, ie raw video, you can use the format input in the open file dialog, or the --left-format and --right-format command line flags, to tell vivictpp how to interpret the input file. These options should be followed by a colon-separated list of key=value pairs. If format is specified as key, the corresponding value will be passed to av_find_input_format to find the correct input format. Any other key value pairs will be passed to avformat_open_input through the options parameter.

Example for playing a file containing raw video data:

vivictpp --left-format format=rawvideo:pixel_format=yuv422p10:video_size=1280x720:framerate=50 my-file.yuv

Controlling playback speed

Playback speed can be controlled with [ and ].

Logging

Logs can be shown in the gui by opening the log window from the menu Help->Logs. The settings dialog has various options for configuring logging. The libav logger is used for logs from libav.

Audio

Audio is currently not supported in the new imgui UI. It might be supported in the future.

Code standard

This project more or less follows the LLVM standard.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! See Contributing, as well as the Code of Conduct.

Test videos

The testdata folder contains some testdata generated with FFmpeg.

Third Party Dependencies

Vivict++ uses the following thirdparty dependencies.

• FFmpeg libav*libraries like libavcodec, libavfilter and more (GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2 or later (OR LGPL))
• SDL2 (zlib License)
• SDL2_ttf (zlib License)
• ImGui (MIT License)
• ImGuiFileDialog (MIT License)
• spdlog (MIT License)
• cli11 (The 3-Clause BSD License)
• Catch2 (Boost Software License 1.0)
• FreeMono from GNU freefont (GPL License)
• vivict-icons (MIT License)
• PlatformFolders (MIT License
• tomlplusplus (MIT License
• utf8(MIT License

License

Vivict++ is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2, or later. Derivative work may be relicensed to a later version of GPL. See LICENSE.