Facebook’s Director of Video Encoding, David Ronca, has just described video processing as a “dirty business” – in a post declaring the need for codecs that solve the pollution problem. Ronca’s rallying cry comes in response to figures that forecast data centers to consume more than 20% of global power in 2025, surging alarmingly from around 3% of global power consumption in 2020. Part of the problem is that with each generation of video codec, comes a 10-fold increase in computational complexity – chiefly in video understanding and video processing – and ultimately this means 10x power consumption. VVC is a prime example, with 40% bitrate savings over HEVC for 8K video, as recent tests have shown, at the cost…