A Comprehensive Video Codec Comparison

Abstract

In this paper, we compare the video codecs AV1 (version 1.0.0-2242 from August 2019), HEVC (HM and x265), AVC (x264), the exploration software JEM which is based on HEVC, and the VVC (successor of HEVC) test model VTM (version 4.0 from February 2019) under two fair and balanced configurations: All Intra for the assessment of intra coding and Maximum Coding Efficiency with all codecs being tuned for their best coding efficiency settings. VTM achieves the highest coding efficiency in both configurations, followed by JEM and AV1. The worst coding efficiency is achieved by x264 and x265, even in the placebo preset for highest coding efficiency. AV1 gained a lot in terms of coding efficiency compared to previous versions and now outperforms HM by 24% BD-Rate gains. VTM gains 5% over AV1 in terms of BD-Rates. By reporting separate numbers for JVET and AOM test sequences, it is ensured that no bias in the test sequences exists. When comparing only intra coding tools, it is observed that the complexity increases exponentially for linearly increasing coding efficiency.

Comparative Rate-Distortion-Complexity Analysis of VVC and HEVC Video Codecs

“…In [25], only PSNR BD-rate and encoder complexity results of VTM4.0 were provided under the AI and RA conditions. However, the analysis also included other encoders.…”

“…Over the past two years, a couple of works have already compared the features of VVC and HEVC, but most of them address VTM8.0 or earlier versions [19]- [25], i.e., before the VVC standard was approved, which makes them outdated. This study is also far more extensive than the most recent one [26], especially in terms of different quality metrics, number of test sequences, and comprehensiveness in complexity analysis and classification of coding tools.…”

An Overview of Coding Tools in AV1: the First Video Codec from the Alliance for Open Media

“…To address community's concerns on the contradictory conclusions, we would like to point out some issues that can be spotted in the provided information. References [15][16][17] claims that libaom-AV1 performs better than x265 under PSNR metric. Reference [16] presents over −30 BDRates for HD (≥720p) content and −17 overall BDRate, [15] shows less gain of 15 possibly because of the quality loss introduced by multi-thread AV1 encoding, and the most recent work [17] mentions that AV1 has −36 and −24 BDRates over x265placebo and HM on the JVET test sets.…”

“…Due to the increasing interest in AV1 performance, many efforts [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17] have been made to conduct performance comparison between libaom-AV1 and other mainstream encoders of other formats. Among other work, the conclusions are different, and some of them have not listed key libaom encoder configurations.…”

“…Reference [16] presents over −30 BDRates for HD (≥720p) content and −17 overall BDRate, [15] shows less gain of 15 possibly because of the quality loss introduced by multi-thread AV1 encoding, and the most recent work [17] mentions that AV1 has −36 and −24 BDRates over x265placebo and HM on the JVET test sets. Note that the results in this paper are mostly inline with [17] with similar performance gaps reported for a similar configuration of the codecs but with different test tests. Other work [10][11][12][13][14] claims much worse AV1 performance.…”