Paper accepted at QoMEX 2026

Title: Quality-Complexity Trade-off for Sustainable Media Delivery

Authors: Hadi Amirpour, Christian Herglotz, Lingfeng Qu, Wei Zhou, Christian Timmerer

Event: QoMEX 2026, Cardiff, UK, June 29th – July 3rd, 2026

Abstract: Sustainable media delivery increasingly requires joint optimization across perceptual quality, bitrate, and computational cost, yet codec comparisons are often reported only in rate-distortion terms without accounting for energy and (en/de)coding time overheads at scale. This paper analyzes quality–rate–computational cost trade-offs using a large-scale dataset. We first quantify the dominant drivers of bitrate, VMAF, and (en/de)coding user time via interpretable regression models, showing that codec and resolution explain a substantial fraction of the observed variance.  We then characterize local sensitivities of bitrate and (en/de)coding user time to incremental increases in VMAF using interpolation in the quality domain and finite-difference derivatives, providing a content-agnostic view of how much additional bitrate and compute, and consequently energy expenditure, is required per unit of quality improvement. To evaluate practical savings, we compute Bjøntegaard Delta metrics relative to a libx264 reference, revealing that large BD-Rate gains can coincide with substantial penalties in (en/de)coding user time, particularly for most recent video coding standards such as Versatile Video Coding (VVC). Finally, we formulate multi-objective configuration selection as a Binary Linear Program (BLP) that selects one operating point per video by trading perceptual quality against bitrate and (en/de)coding user time; across different weight regimes, the selected codec-resolution-frame-rate distributions shift coherently with system priorities.