PERCEPTUAL QUALITY ASSESSMENT METRIC BASED CONTENT AND VIEWER AWARE ENCODING

Candidate encodes of a source video are produced using a plurality of encoding configurations. Quality of experience (QoE) scores for each of the candidate encodes are computed. The QoE scores of the plurality of candidate encodes are compared to determine a lowest bitrate encode that achieve a target QoE score. The lowest bitrate encode that achieve the target QoE score as an optimized output video is selected.