README

VC-2 Reference Encoder and Decoder
----------------------------------

Copyright (C) Tim Borer, James Weaver and Galen Reich 2010-2020,
British Broadcasting Corporation.
< galen.reich@bbc.co.uk >


This repository contains a SMPTE 2042-1 VC-2 reference encoder and
decoder. It can be compiled using autotools on Linux or Windows and
includes the following executables once compiled:

 o EncodeStream -- an encoder which will encode a VC-2 compliant stream
   using one of the supported LD or HQ profiles.
 o DecodeStream -- a decoder which will decode a VC-2 compliant stream
   which complies with the LD or HQ profiles.

The EncodeStream tool supports the following profiles:
 o HQ_CBR -- an encoder for the High Quality (HQ) profile of
   VC-2 which encodes at a constant bit rate.
 o HQ_ConstQ -- an encoder for the High Quality (HQ) profile of
   VC-2 which encodes with a constant quantiser value.
 o LD -- an OBSOLETE encoder for the Low Delay (LD) profile of VC-2.
   (included for backwards compatibility).

In addition, an optional utility (DecodeFrame) is includeded which
takes in the compressed bytes of a VC-2 frame without any surrounding
headers. This is not compiled by default but can be enabled with the
--enable-frame-decoder flag (./configure --enable-frame-decoder).

The googletest testing framework can be used to run tests on the
repository. This requires the googletest submodule to be added by
  git submodule init
  git submodule update
(or using --recurse-submodules when cloning)
Then using `make check' to build and run the tests.

Additional help on each executable will be printed if it is run with
the --help parameter.