Moscow State University Releases 10th HEVC Video Codec Comparison (compression.ru)

An anonymous reader writes: The Graphics and Media Lab Video Group of Moscow State University has released its tenth video codecs comparison. This latest comparison focuses on HEVC codecs and includes some non-HEVC codecs such as x264 and VP9. The report concludes that Intel's MSS HEVC Software codec leads the pack in the "fast transcoding" use case whereas x265 takes the lead in the "ripping" use case. VP9 compares favorably to the HEVC codecs in the fixed quality and the speed versus quality test cases. See the PDF version of the report for more details.

Comments

Re:X264 still relevant

[Kjella]

I might be reading the partial report wrong, but as far as I understood, x264 is not scoring low against HEVC. Either that or HEVC encoders are not mature enough. I get that the "real-time" encoder has very specific constraints, but how about the others?

From what I understand there's three areas where HEVC does very well:
- Extremely low bitrates, because there's more blurring and less blocking that looks less bad.
- 4K/UHD resolution because it supports larger block sizes that are more efficient at high resolution.
- Better parallelism (WPP) for software decoding, if you have full hardware support it doesn't matter.

For moderate resolutions like 1080p at moderate bit rates x264 is still performing very well and it's highly optimized. HEVC brings some new tricks that should improve compression further, but nothing really revolutionary like 20-30%. I mean there's better picture compression than JPG and better audio compression than MP3 but they're "close enough", at this point there's no big need to hurry unless you control the entire ecosystem like say Netflix or YouTube and can do HEVC where it's supported and downgrade to H.264 where it's not. For encoding to a broad number of unknown devices it's going to be H.264 for a long time to come. Looking at broadband speeds most people will either have so fast connections it doesn't matter or so slow connections it doesn't matter, there aren't many in the gap where the size difference is really significant. And I got a feeling 100GB for 4K BluRay is plenty, there are many movies now using only 20-40GB of the possible 50GB so I suspect we'll see H.264 used quite a bit there too. And the commercial terms for HEVC are worse, so there's very little compelling need to use it really.