VC-6 improving
AI training ROI

VC-6 is a multi-resolution codec that means no-more-proxies. This interactive demo allows you to explore the costs of retrieving content for AI training.

Doing no work is faster and greener than doing **some work. With VC-6, all the resolutions you need are stored in layers in the initial compression. Traditional solutions require proxies. Here, we measure

• a VC-6 multi-resolution content-at-rest workflow
• an FFMPEG on-demand proxy workflow

The demo uses a MetaRex worker node to intercept API calls and dynamically change the API so that you can transparently deploy VC-6 into existing workflows

Cost calculation is based on an April 2025 snapshot of AWS pricing.

Each time the workflow is run, the mrx-worker looks at the costs of sending the proxies to an AI endpoint:

• FFMPEG:
  • compute cost of subsampling and creating proxies with FFMPEG
  • network costs of reading the source to do subsampling
  • increased storage cost of (proxy+source)
• VC-6 costs:
  • difference between original FFMPEG compression & VC-6 compression (almost zero)
  • no networks additional costs - proxies already in original compression
• common costs ignored
  • original compression cost (almost identical)
  • retrieval API costs - MetaRex makes them identical by design
  • AI processing costs - identical by design
  • latency differences between solutions ignored - hard to cost

The overall ROI workflow is based on

• 1000 hr/day of new content ingested at full res (4k or HD)
• VC-6 is 40% more expensive than H.264 for the original ingest
• viewed content traverses an AWS NAT cost point
• all content is stored for 1 month on S3
• all content is software encoded on an AWS t3a instance
• 1000 hr/day of new content analysed via Lo res proxy
• 100 hr/day of new content re-analysed via Mi res proxy
• 10 hr/day of new content re-re-analysed via Hi res proxy
• the actual AI costs don’t vary because the AI API does not change
• only the storage/retrieval of the ingested-proxy content is used for costs
• For NAB, costs are a snapshot of AWS prices in March 2025
• Real Time analytics pending a supporter to put them into MetaRex open-source instrumentation

If there are ways you’d like the ROI metrics to controlled with user parameters, please contact MetaRex