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VP8 and H.264 Codecs Compared In Detail
An anonymous reader writes "Moscow State University's Graphics and Media lab have released their sixth MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 video codecs comparison. Also of note is a recently added appendix to the report which compares VP8, x264, and Xvid. The reference VP8 encoder holds its own against x264 despite the source material offering x264 a slight advantage. The VP8 developers comment in the report: 'We've been following the MSU tests since they began and respect the group's work. One issue we noticed in the test is that most input sequences were previously compressed using other codecs. These sequences have an inherent bias against VP8 in recompression tests. As pointed out by other developers, H.264 and MPEG-like encoders have slight advantages in reproducing some of their own typical artifacts, which helps their objective measurement numbers but not necessarily visual quality. This is reflected by relatively better results for VP8 on the only uncompressed input sequence, "mobile calendar."'"
First, that claim was made by an x264 developer. Second, that comment in itself is misleading. VP8 developers didn't claim the bias affected visual quality. Here's the exact quote:
H.264 and MPEG-like encoders have slight advantages in reproducing some of their own typical artifacts, which helps their objective measurement numbers but not necessarily visual quality.
x264 developers need to take it easy and let their implementation speak on its merits rather than attempt to discredit VP8 at every opportunity.
Renders fine in Opera, a standards compliant browser :)
"His name was James Damore."
You can do realtime, baseline H.264 encoding on Cortex A8 and A9 chips with x264.
While looking at encoder comparisons, keep in mind this post from a x264 developer about cheating on encoder comparisons. I'm not saying that these guys are cheating, just things to look out for.
iPhone 4 records video at 10.8 Mbps baseline 3.1, 1280x720 at 29.97fps. Most of the DSLRs that shoot video, shoot in h264 and consumer cameras are increasingly switching to h264 as they dump tape based recording methods. It's nice that the authors didn't really bother trying to find properly high bitrate stuff as source materials. Oh well.
For now at least.
You have to be realistic.
H.264 isn't just about the cell phone phone and the web.
It's a broadcast, cable and sattelite video standard, a Blu-Ray standard. It is deeply entrenched in industrial and security video.
A search of Google Shopping for "H.264" will return 40,000 hits.
There are 847 AVC/H.264 Licensees
The Asian industrial giants like Mitsubishi are very well represented.
It's also almost never H264 first but MJPEG/XVid/MPEG2/etc and NOT H264. For a start, encoders for mobile phones don't have the power to encode H264 live. So the OP assertion is obviously and trivially wrong.
Really? My team works with a lot of Prosumer cameras that output H264. There's a quickly growing amount of content on YouTube and elsewhere that's filmed on such cameras, or even their lower end brethren - which also often output in H264.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
But the site isn't, it has 165 errors and 8 warnings. So in fact a strict compliant browser shouldn't render it fine.
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And there's almost two billion chinese trying to make hardware that doesn't infringe pattens so they can sell obscenely cheaper here in the west.
The manufacturer's license for H.264 is $0 - for sales of 100,000 units or less each year.
20 cents a unit - for sales of 100,001 to 5 million units a year.
10 cents a unit - for sales above 5 million a year.
With an "Enterprise Cap" of $5 million a year.
SUMMARY OF AVC/H.264 LICENSE TERMS
The Korean Samsung Group - for comparison - has about a quarter of a million employees and annual revenues of $170 billion.
Except that in the US at least, the only one of those things that use it is BluRay. Broadcast, Cable, and Satellite still use mpeg2. Even many Blu-Ray's use mpeg2.
You're thinking of it like there's dedicated h264 hardware in, say, the iPhone. There isn't. There's hardware that accelerates decoding of h264... that same exact hardware can be used to decode VP8.
Think of it like how your desktop uses SSE3 to speed up h264 decoding... SSE3 doesn't contain an h264 decoder.