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

Posted by timothy on from the squeezing-things-down dept.

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.

25 of 51 comments (clear)

  1. Can't wait until they become popular by HalAtWork · · Score: 1

    Bandwidth savings using these codecs are remarkable. I can't wait until more hardware support for low power recording and decoding on most devices, and wider app support on the desktop. I've been wanting to transcode some of my media to fool around with quality and size settings but haven't seen much support in common apps yet.

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  2. There is a cost with all that by QuantumReality · · Score: 5, Informative

    Encoding times. You can't squeeze more in less space without cost, cost here are cpu cycles. Encoding times of higher quality stuff which i did was about 5-6 times longer than comparable quality of x264. But it's size was around 40-50% smaller than x264 one. There is a cost not only in encoding, there is a cost in decoding too, it takes a lot more cpu cycles to decode x265. Either way HEVC is VERY GOOD codec.

    1. Re:There is a cost with all that by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      HEVC doesn't work with low power devices. I can't show a 1080p video on a 5 year old laptop, and it runs pretty clunky on one I bought last year. So before you go mad encoding everything in it realize that it uses about 2-4x the cpu to show the same video. This basically can break them for anything not running a discreet gpu. Pardon me if I sit out the "public beta" period of the codec. :)

    2. Re:There is a cost with all that by sanf780 · · Score: 1

      HEVC is not supported by most HW. This situation is a similar one as when 1080p started to become popular less than ten years ago. Software like KMPlayer were the thing to have installed. Either you have supporting SW and HW or you are going to suffer a lot. I just hope that most HW video decoding blocks in computers can be of any use for HEVC. I know most appliances like SmartTVs will not.

    3. Re:There is a cost with all that by Crowd+Computing · · Score: 1
      Most desktop computers are powerful enough play back HEVC through software decoding. Many newer ARM-based SoCs already include HEVC hardware decoding support for 720p and 1080p video, the most common video quality found in the web and the torrent scene. An example is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 410:

      1080p HD video playback and capture with H.264 (AVC)
      720p playback with H.265 (HEVC)
      DASH is supported

      Most of the major Chinese semiconductor design companies already produce mid-range SoCs capable of decoding 4K HEVC.

    4. Re:There is a cost with all that by slaker · · Score: 3, Informative

      The first time I played an MP3, my 486 sputtered and couldn't manage an unbroken audio stream. The first time I played a DVD, I needed a dedicated daughterboard to handle decoding.

      Right now, HEVC needs decent hardware and encoding takes a good long while. But it does play back fine on everything I have sitting around, going back to 3rd generation Core i CPUs, even with just Intel graphics. The i3 NUC in my living room doesn't have any problem with it at all. My STBs can't do it, but I can hand transcoding off to Plex and then they're fine as well. Given another year and everybody well catch or surpass Amazon's FireTV and have support for it as well. At that point, just like MP3s, MPEG2 and x.264, we'll be back to taking hardware support for granted.

      --
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    5. Re:There is a cost with all that by Gaygirlie · · Score: 1

      HEVC is not supported by most HW.

      HEVC is actually pretty well supported by mobile - devices and "smart-TVs" provided they are 2-3 years old or newer. Support on desktops and laptops is still lagging behind, but it's getting better fast there, too.

    6. Re:There is a cost with all that by tdelaney · · Score: 1

      Whilst this is currently true, the situation is improving rapidly. I've been periodically testing the OpenELEC Kodi Jarvis alpha builds on my Raspberry Pi 2.

      The previous time I tested it (a month or so ago), 720p HEVC was just playable - ~100% CPU on both cores, but only dropping the occasional frame. The time before that, 720p HEVC was unwatchable. But with build #1016 (which includes FFMPEG 2.8.1) I was getting smooth playback and averaging around 60% CPU on both cores.

      HEVC will obviously never have the same hardware requirements that h264 does now, but there is a lot of work currently going into reducing the requirements.

      Of course, I'd much prefer that royalty-free codecs take the fore.

    7. Re:There is a cost with all that by Hodr · · Score: 1

      It certainly does, just needs to be newer hardware. I have a $130 Braswell based NUC that I play x265 media on (1080p, no 4k) without issues. And it runs sub 15 watts for the total system.

  3. X264 still relevant by sanf780 · · Score: 1

    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?

    1. Re:X264 still relevant by Kjella · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

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    2. Re:X264 still relevant by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      > I might be reading the partial report wrong, but as far as I understood, x264 is not scoring low against HEVC.

      That was my take away. At very, very low bitrates HEVC produced superior results, but once you got to around 4mbps the difference between x264 and the best HEVC encoders was negligible. For me, ~4mbps is the bare minimum for 1080p anyway, so that makes HEVC useless to me as of now. That is kind of disappointing, actually.

      > Either that or HEVC encoders are not mature enough.

      I am confident that is a major factor. The x264 encoder has well over 10 years of active open-source development during which quality improved substantially. The HEVC encoders don't have anywhere near that amount of real-world usage and refinement yet.

    3. Re:X264 still relevant by jedidiah · · Score: 1

      ...except encoding takes DAYS rather than hours. This is a detail that you even mentioned yourself but chose not to acknowledge as meaningful.

      Also, declaring that the settings were "comparable" is a bit disengenuous. Even back in the bad old days when I used divx for better encode speed, an h264 did not take DAYS.

      --
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  4. My x265 Experience - Poor by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    My experience with x265 and 4K video has been quite poor. Transcoding speeds are slow, like under 10fps on a i7-4790K CPU @ 4.00GHz.

    Decoding/playback is barely OK. VLC playback of 4K HEVC video crushes the processor and there are far too many hangs/glitches.

    The fact that x265 doesn't, and perhaps won't, have any sort of hardware acceleration support just makes it awful to do 4K work.

    1. Re:My x265 Experience - Poor by Gaygirlie · · Score: 2

      The fact that x265 doesn't, and perhaps won't, have any sort of hardware acceleration support just makes it awful to do 4K work.

      x265, just like x264, are software-encoders; of course they're going to be slow. If you want hardware-accelerated encoding you could, for example, get yourself a GTX 960 and compile ffmpeg with NVENC - support. I have a GTX 970 and I've played around with ffmpeg with NVENC quite a bit and if my memory serves correctly I get around ~90 FPS when encoding 1080p - source using NVENC. I haven't tried with 4K - video, I'll grant you that, so I have no idea how fast it can encode that. I could try it, I suppose, if you really wanted me to.

    2. Re:My x265 Experience - Poor by Gaygirlie · · Score: 1

      I think there is some bug with VLC wrt. HEVC. No matter if I'm using H/W-acceleration or not VLC just can't play HEVC-videos smoothly, but if I'm using some other player it's silky-smooth even at 60 FPS.

    3. Re:My x265 Experience - Poor by Gaygirlie · · Score: 1

      I'd really appreciate hearing those results.Theory holds that 4K, or more accurately 2160p should be around 22fps on your rig. But, that's just theory.

      Please test and let us know. Also, are you doing this on Linux or Windows?

      I am doing this under Windows and I seem to be getting 28 FPS while doing NVENC_HEVC. I am using a VBR 2-pass preset, which is the slowest, but highest-quality combination possible on a Maxwell 2 NVIDIA GPU -- dropping to 1-pass or using CBR would speed it up some. 28 FPS 4K H/W-based HEVC-encoding isn't bad, IMHO. On my system (Xeon 1230V3) CPU-utilization is sitting at 14% and as I have SpeedStep enabled the system hasn't even bothered to raise the CPU's clocks for this, they're sitting at the lowest speed they can go -- basically, the system is perfectly responsive and useable while doing this encoding.

      I don't know what else you'd like to know, but I hope this was helpful.

  5. Still won't work in Internet Explorer by RogueWarrior65 · · Score: 1

    How the hell does Microsoft manage to get away so such dismal compatibility?

    1. Re:Still won't work in Internet Explorer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      No web browser supports H.265 (aka HEVC) video. In contrast Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and soon Microsoft Edge support VP9 video. So don't worry about H.265 for browsers. Just use VP9 and be happy.

  6. Patents by RenHoek · · Score: 2

    Doesn't matter how good x265 is, as long as patent litigation clouds keep forming over it, it will not succeed.

    1. Re:Patents by delt0r · · Score: 1

      these codec specs reads like there are 100 engineers each with 2 lawyers and a patent attorney trying to get there little block filter or other obvious optimisation into the spec. Each little "feature" is another patented "invention". It is litterly designed by committee to *be a licensing nightmare*.

      --
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    2. Re:Patents by tlhIngan · · Score: 1

      these codec specs reads like there are 100 engineers each with 2 lawyers and a patent attorney trying to get there little block filter or other obvious optimisation into the spec. Each little "feature" is another patented "invention". It is litterly designed by committee to *be a licensing nightmare*.

      Which is why patent pool organizations were set up. Instead of trying to figure out which of the thousands of people you have to negotiate with, you go to the patent pool, and buy your licenses. No negotiations needed - they're all standard and sold per-unit. Need to make 1000 widgets? Buy 1000 licenses and you're done.

      For the MPEG family of codecs, the pool is the MPEG Licensing Authority, aka MPEG-LA. For h.264, they realized that they needed to get broad adoption which they did by having a ceiling of fees (once you ship N units, each addition unit license costs are "free". Netflix, Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, etc., all do this), free licenses for "free to view" streams (e.g., you can put up ads, and as long as users don't pay directly, it's free). Of course, this lead to wide and broad adoption - since for the most part everyone big paid a lump sum of money for unlimited use (why do you think companies like Microsoft and Apple give away decoders?).

      The big problem is the h.265 patent owners decided they hated this. They saw the widespread adoption of h.264 and that the MPEG-LA wasn't giving them more money. And MPEG-LA was planning on using the same licensing terms to encourage adoption of HEVC (and may help that by increasing fees of h.264 to encourage people to adopt HEVC/h.265).

      Of course, the patent owners disagreed, and formed their own patent pool. Which is fine if everyone did it, but now you have patents only covered by MPEG-LA, and others only covered by the HEVC alliance.

      You can predict the end result - HEVC adoption will probably stall out - there's no reason to use HEVC to justify the extra costs - and yes, that includes sites like YouTube as well which are covered under both the "free" streaming and the license payment cap. (There's no more free streaming of HEVC - while MPEG-LA allows it, the HEVC alliance wants per-stream payment even on free streams).

      So yeah, you'd be hard-pressed to get the same adoption of HEVC as h.264, because the guys involved ignored the fact that the reason h.264 is the dominant codec is because it's easy and cheap to use.

  7. Re:Moscow State? by unixisc · · Score: 1

    There is a Moscow Oblast, which would be an equivalent of state. Although Russia has quite an hierarchy of divisions from federal district to federal subject.

    The other explanation is that 'state' is synonymous w/ government, and that this university is run by the government in Moscow.

  8. Re:how doest it compare to daala ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Are We Compressed Yet uses some objective metrics to compare the current Daala development to x264, x265, VP9, and Thor. Although bear in mind that objective metrics aren't perfect and don't always tell the whole story. See pages 27 and 28 of these NetVC presentation slides. To me the Daala encoded image looks better and captures more detail, but it scores worse on the objective metric.

  9. Re:Moscow State? by bloodhawk · · Score: 1

    So much ignorance in your post. An oblast is roughly the equivalent of a state. There is a Moscow Oblast. probably should try using google before making yourself look like an idiot.