Alibaba's Taotian S266 encoder sweeps 6 world titles at MSU 2025 video codec contest

机器之心 · wechat · 2026-09-12

The 19th MSU World Video Codec Competition (FullHD track) results are out: Taotian's in-house S266 series took 6 world championships and one third place against 27 codecs from Tencent, Kuaishou, AOMedia and others. S266 swept the VMAF metric across all three speed tiers (1/5/30 FPS), while S266X won SSIM, PSNR and subjective quality at the 1FPS extreme-compression tier.

The H.266/VVC-based S266 beats open-source x265 with 60%+ bitrate reduction at better PSNR/SSIM. Backed by research like TCP-Net (Transformer-based partition speedup), MID-Net (DL intra-mode decision) and ProGVC, a progressive autoregressive generative video codec, S266 now powers Taobao's short-video and livestreaming with 100M+ daily views, cutting bandwidth cost by 30%+ at equal quality and letting weak-network users stream 720P/1080P instead of 480P.

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