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H.265/HEVC vs. H.264/AVC: 50% bit rate savings verified
- asb 11y agoIt's a shame the royalty-free VP9 wasn't also included in this comparison.
- Someone1234 11y agoYou might find this an interesting read (PDF): http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/200925/files/article-vp9-submited-v2.pdf http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/200925/files/article-vp9-s...
- agrover 11y agotl;dr vp9 is competitive with h.264 but not h.265
- ultramancool 11y agoIt seems a lot closer to h.265 than h.264, but still worse than it in all trials here. Give them another revision or two, they can probably beat it.
- ZeroGravitas 11y agoReal tl;dr: We downloaded a random git commit a year before a release was made and claimed it was officially released. Best case scenario, we don't understand the difference between a spec and implementation being finalized. Worst case: intentional hatchet job.
- TD-Linux 11y agoThis paper is quite old and has known problems with setting a constant quantizer for VP9. The results do not match my own findings comparing libvpx and x265 at all [1]. libvpx VP9 is still worse than x265, but the difference is quite small. [1] https://arewecompressedyet.com/ https://arewecompressedyet.com/
- jsprogrammer 11y agoBBC apparently does not consider VP9 to be a major video coding standard. >The High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard has been developed jointly by the two standardisation bodies ITU and ISO (as has been the practice with all major video coding standards in the past 3 decades);
- clouddrover 11y agoAnd that's probably the right call for the BBC. Hopefully they'll get behind the NetVC [1] effort and support that in the future. The NetVC codec is to be built from Daala and Thor, and maybe VP10 as well. To complement NetVC there's also the Alliance for Open Media [2], but I'm a bit disappointed that the only public output from AOMedia so far seems to be a press release from September last year. 1. https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/netvc/documents/ https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/netvc/documents/ 2. http://aomedia.org/ http://aomedia.org/
- anonymfus 11y agoBut there are no software patents in UK so all these formats must be free for BBC until they will use patented dedicated hardware.
- TD-Linux 11y ago>But there are no software patents in UK This has never been true for video. Even as far back as MPEG-2, the MPEG-LA has had GB patent numbers (as well as most other European countries).
- dogma1138 11y agoThe software doesn't really matter all of these encoders will have hardware implementations which will incur royalties.
- Veratyr 11y agoMoscow State University has a more broad test (including VP9) here if you're interested: http://compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/hevc_2015/MSU_HEVC_comparison_2015_free.pdf http://compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/hevc_2015/MSU_H...
- imaginenore 11y agoIf you look at the latest movie/TV torrents, HEVC is gaining popularity, and the files are indeed half as big.
- petra 11y agoBut they usually skimp on quality , it's rare/complex to find videos without artifacts.
- rpgmaker 11y agoI think this is the fault of the users who encode them. They don't do the bitrate calculus right. That's why I mostly avoid HEVC releases.
- voltagex_ 11y agoI don't think there's a Scene Standard [1] for HEVC yet. Even the one for x264 is a few years old and might not represent state-of-the-art. If you're talking about P2P groups - all bets are off. There's even major groups of regional cappers who still use XVid... as a hobbyist archivist this makes me very sad. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_(warez) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_(warez) OT: personally, TV shows ripped off Blu Rays being 2GB / episode seems ridiculous
- tracker1 11y agoIt's a crapshoot.. I've seen some quality encodes with HEVC, and have been opting for HEVC 1080p when available at around the same size as 720p AVC. Most of my own rips of blueray have been 720p/x264, and I'm thinking about re-ripping HEVC for the better quality... size on my NAS has been a minor concern... but having it all available from kodi is the best.
- gruez 11y agoAccording to another comment[1], to achieve 50% savings, encoding time needs to be 10x to 20x longer. I suspect that in the race to be the first group to release, they use faster settings at the expense of artifacting. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10888898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10888898
- chocolatebunny 11y agoWasn't it supposed to be 75% savings. When HEVC first came out the claim was that 4K HEVC encoded video would have the same bitrate as 1080p AVC encoded video.
- rkangel 11y agoThat always sounded a lot like marketing speak. The 50% improvement that we have got is pretty f*ing impressive.
- d--b 11y agonope, the research group has always had the 50% target from h.264 to h.265. Marketers might have had the math wrong ;)
- DuskStar 11y agoIIRC, 4k AVC is only twice the bitrate of 1080p AVC (or something like that - I know that the scaling is less than 1:1, though), which would make 4k HEVC have about the same bitrate as 1080p AVC.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- nchrys 11y agoIn fact quadrupling the number of pixels does not result necessarily in a 4x multiplication in bitrate, much less in general. That is because a movie recorded for example at 4K resolution is not at all the same as 4 different/independent 1080p movies that you would stick together in the same 4K frame. There are correlations/statistical properties that are exploited in the first case by the encoder and that does not exist in the second case. I have seen somewhere (though I can't find the reference) a back of the enveloppe calculation using Fourier analysis that showed that to multiply by 4 the number of pixel you only needed to multiply by 2 the bitrate. So, if HEVC has 50% bitrate savings that would explain the claim that 4K HEVC could have the same bitrate as 1080p AVC. Of course there is much more happening in HEVC than just a Discrete Cosine Transform (motion compensation etc.) so I don't know how this really applies in practice, and I haven't done the tests myself...
- leeoniya 11y agowonder how Daala is coming along. no news in a while but there is code happening: https://github.com/xiph/daala https://github.com/xiph/daala
- derf_ 11y agoThis is the progress for the past year: https://arewecompressedyet.com/?r[]=master-2016-01-01-0824738&r[]=master-2014-12-10T16-13-14.342Z&s=ntt-short-1 https://arewecompressedyet.com/?r[]=master-2016-01-01-082473... Select "Entire curve (old method)" to see BD-rate numbers (the new method requires data overlap in all three bitrate ranges in order to work, which the old curve does not have).
- IshKebab 11y agoTL;DR: It is now slightly better than x264, but quite far from x265, as measured by SSIM.
- mbebenita 11y agoYou can compare various codecs: HEVS (x265), VP9 and the latest Daala build) at: https://arewecompressedyet.com/?r%5B%5D=x265_1.6_ntt-short-1&r%5B%5D=libvpx-vp9-1.4.0-ntt-short-1&r%5B%5D=master-2016-01-05-a1f5eac&s=ntt-short-1 https://arewecompressedyet.com/?r%5B%5D=x265_1.6_ntt-short-1... The results vary wildly depending on test clips, the metrics used and bit-rates, so an accurate comparison is quite difficult to do
- dharma1 11y agoWill Daala have hw acceleration?
- nitrogen 11y agoSince we're already seeing acceleration for VPx, it's likely chips will start implementing it some time after it's ready.
- Veratyr 11y agoThere was a talk on it a while ago at a VideoLan conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7fVwIZBW8Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7fVwIZBW8Q
- Thaxll 11y agoHopefully ffmpeg will get speed improvements for H.265/HEVC, last time I checked it was way to slow to be used.
- tracker1 11y agoIt's usually the case with new generations of software encoders.. I remember how long DVD rips would take in 2000... And remember how slow h.264 was when it became more common.
- cm2187 11y agoCan H265 benefit from Quick Sync hardware acceleration or is it just for H264?
- wmf 11y agoSkylake has H.265 Quick Sync but previous generations don't.
- snuxoll 11y agoQuick Sync also isn't exactly what I'd call a high-quality encoder, it is useful for things like realtime streaming or screencast recording, but if you are encoding movies or TV shows you will want a "real" HEVC encoder.
- willkelleher 11y agoOn Skylake and newer, yes.
- Veratyr 11y agoQuickSync works but it's also worth noting that NVIDIA supports it on their second generation Maxwell cards.
- paulmd 11y agoAll Maxwell cards, actually. GM107, GM204, and GM200 all use a combination of a GPU shader kernel with some CPU assistance. GM206 (in the GTX 960 and 950) implements a newer revision of the PureVideo decoder that allows H265 to be decoded directly on the video engine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_PureVideo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_PureVideo
- wmf 11y agoLet's be careful about decoding vs. encoding.
- p0nce 11y ago
- zokier 11y agoI wonder if the choice of encoder has an impact to the results; on a quick glance they appear to use Fraunhofer reference encoder for H.264 whereas afaik x264 is the state of art wrt subjective quality. In my unprofessional opinion 8 Mbps sounds quite low for 4k h264 encoding, I would expect that sort of rate for good quality 1080p encoding (Blu-Rays being in the 20 Mbps range afaik)
- izacus 11y agoThe choice of the encoder has huge impact on the results - e.g. hardware H.264 encoders in phones will hardly produce anything watcheable at 5Mbit@720p while x264 produces watchable output at 2Mbit at same resolution. Same goes for those other encoders - they vary hugely in quality and used CPU at same bitrate and resolution.
- pjc50 11y agoEncoder bitrate alone does not determine quality; the question is which of the many algorithms available to use are actually used ("encoder profile").
- Veratyr 11y agoEncoder has a massive impact on results: http://www.compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/h264_2012/mpeg4_avc_h264_video_codecs_comparison.pdf http://www.compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/h264_2012/m... This actually goes for most codecs, including both audio and video (have a look at the AAC encoders at http://soundexpert.org/encoders-128-kbps http://soundexpert.org/encoders-128-kbps )
- muizelaar 11y agoThe reference encoder is known to have quality that's quite a bit worse than x264 so this paper is probably overstating the advantage of h265 over h264
- ju-st 11y agoVP9 vs H264 vs H265: - Next-gen codecs provide 50% bitrate improvements over x264, but are 10-20x as slow at the top settings required to accomplish such results. - Normalized for CPU usage, libvpx already has some selling points when compared to x264; x265 is still too slow to be useful in most practical scenarios except in very high-end scenarios. - ffvp9 is an incredibly awesome decoder that outperforms all other decoders. https://blogs.gnome.org/rbultje/2015/09/28/vp9-encodingdecoding-performance-vs-hevch-264/ https://blogs.gnome.org/rbultje/2015/09/28/vp9-encodingdecod...
- Veratyr 11y agoffvp9 is indeed awesome. There was a talk at VideoLan Dev Days about the development. They outperform the reference decoder and optimized basically everything they could touch.
- keithwinstein 11y agoOne downside of VP9: the VP9 spec is still under NDA from Google. There is no publicly available spec. As far as I know, the only people that have written a software VP9 decoder are either Google employees (libvpx) or ex-Google-employees who worked on VP9 when they were there (rbultje, who wrote ffvp9 with Clément Bœsch).
- DannyBee 11y agoWhich "spec" are you referring to? The bitstream spec is definitely public.
- nightcracker 11y agoI think that the encoding time needs more attention too, as it's crucial for livestreaming.
- Veratyr 11y agoFor livestreaming, NVIDIA (I believe AMD as well actually) graphics cards offer NVENC, which is a hardware HEVC encoder that can easily meet most people's needs.
- kevingadd 11y agoThe problem with livestreaming using hardware encoders is that the quality is utter garbage compared to software encoders, which means that given the bitrate available to you it may in fact be so ugly to be unwatchable. A typical home DSL connection does not have enough bitrate to produce a quality mid-to-high resolution stream using NVENC, and even if you have a good connection, Twitch caps out at 3500kbps. The gap between something like NVENC/QuickSync and x264 is enormous. At the very least, HEVC's huge bitrate/quality advantage over H264 will help it here, but when it comes to GPU encoders they will just be attempting to catch up with what you can get right now using x264. Live streaming quality aside, though, you are right that the hardware will make it possible for people to do live streaming in scenarios where they previously would've been unable to, because you can combine a hardware HEVC encoder with a low bitrate connection and at least get something watchable.
- Veratyr 11y agoDo you have data to back that up? I've found that when comparing SSIM and PSNR, NVENC's H.264 encoder is able to quite handily beat x264 for quality while targeting the same bitrate and encode speed. This was using a Gen 2 Maxwell GPU and comparing to a mid range Xeon.
- kevingadd 11y agoIt's possible software is the problem here. I have certainly never seen a way to get acceptable quality out of NVENC in common consumer game streaming software like OBS, and I've tried at length including adjusting profiles and tuning settings. It doesn't help that NVENC's documentation is atrocious. NVENC also mishandles color spaces considerably (full vs limited range), which is a big handicap to begin with. SSIM and PSNR aren't really the question here either, the issue is totally perceptual. I do not doubt that on a speed basis NVENC is competitive or outperforms, the question is simply whether you can deliver something watchable that hits under the user's upstream cap. If you look at average twitch streams of even mundane video games, many of them are borderline unwatchable - this is a pervasive problem :-) Kicking butt on image-wide SSIM and PSNR won't be much use if all the text in a story-driven game is unreadable due to artifacts.
- blinkingled 11y agoRelated : OpenCL based encoder for VP9. http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160112005093/en/Ittiam-enables-OpenCL-based-VP9-Encode-Mobile http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160112005093/en/Itti...
- envy2 11y agoInterestingly, the place I've seen the most widespread adoption of HEVC is China: Android-based set-top boxes with hardware H.265 decoding are widely[1] available[2], and a number of the major IPTV services (both authorised and unauthorised) are using it, including for live content. I was quite surprised to find I was able to stream a very high quality 1080p movie on a random unbranded Chinese IPTV box at ~2mbps that looked every bit as good as what Netflix streams at 5mbps.
- throwaway743829 11y agoBoxes with 4Kx2K H.265 hardware decoder have been around since 12/2014 with SoCs from Rockchip, Amlogic and AllWinner. Volume prices start at $40, depends on RAM/eMMC size 1G/8G - 2G/16G. Yes, that's the price for a packaged box including power plug and lots of cables ... not just a PCB. Amlogic just announced S905X with 4Kx2K VP9 hardware decoder: http://www.cnx-software.com/2016/01/12/amlogic-s905x-processor-specifications/ http://www.cnx-software.com/2016/01/12/amlogic-s905x-process... And it does HDR10 (BT.2020), too. Rockchip announced new HDR10 SoCs at CES: http://www.cnx-software.com/2016/01/12/rockchip-rk3229-and-rk3399-32-bit-and-64-bit-processors-support-4k-10-bit-h-265-and-hdmi-2-0/ http://www.cnx-software.com/2016/01/12/rockchip-rk3229-and-r... First HDR10 boxes will be released in 2 months. Now, we have a different problem ... where to get an affordable screen that can display it ...
- voltagex_ 11y agoHas anyone used these? The one I had used an outdated fork of Android 4 and could never be updated because the hardware decoder could only be used with an OEM (binary only) video player.
- throwaway743829 11y agoYeah, the pre-installed software is usually crap. But there are plenty of modded ROMs for the more popular boxes. And you can't beat the price as an OEM product -- just put your own software on it. The source release policy has gotten better in the past year. Mainly due to Google (Chromebox), Hardkernel (ODroid) and others kicking the manufacturers. At least they're upstreaming their drivers now. They have to clean up ~1M lines per SoC family, that'll take some time. And userspace is not just blobs anymore. For example Amlogic regularly publishes a (working!) buildroot at http://openlinux.amlogic.com:8000/download/ http://openlinux.amlogic.com:8000/download/ . Microcode for VPU or Wifi still comes as blobs.
- ilurkedhere 11y agoDoes one need to pay to use this new codec?
- wmf 11y agoYes, you have to pay these people: http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/HEVC/Pages/Intro.aspx http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/HEVC/Pages/Intro.aspx and maybe also these people: http://www.hevcadvance.com/#licence http://www.hevcadvance.com/#licence
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- shmerl 11y agoHow soon will Daala + Thor (with some new name) shape up into something ready for production? Also, does anyone know what is the situation with DASH? It seems that MPEG-LA cartel tried to create some FUD about it being patent encumbered.
- voltagex_ 11y agoThis is completely offtopic, but I'd love to do some encoding tests, except that the canonical test clips seem to be from Big Buck Bunny - animation encodes differently than live-action video. Does anyone know of some Free-as-in-speech clips from a wider range of sources/cameras that I can use without being sued into oblivion? Australia doesn't really have Fair Use provisions.
- ubitaco 11y agoPerhaps you can start at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Free_media_resources/Video https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Free_media_resour... Good luck!
- __P 11y agoAustralia doesn't have Fair Use provision because it doesn't need it. Australia allows use of copyrighted material for research/teaching purposes (up to a % limit). As in it isn't against the law at all. Where as Fair Use Provision is a defence, when you are charged with breach of copyright (much like "self defence" in an assault charge). (This is how even in Australia, Teachers are allowed to photocopy material for classes, and Journalists can report on other materials without being sued). The Copyright Agency tries to police and charge royalties if applicable.
- voltagex_ 11y agoRight. Looks like the first item in [1] under the 1968 Act protects me, but If I'm wrong, [2] will see my computer destroyed. I'm not able to find anything regarding DRM, but I think that's what they mean by decoder. IANAL. 1: http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ca1968133/s40.html http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ca1968133/... 2: https://www.comlaw.gov.au/Details/C2006A00158/Html/Text#param128 https://www.comlaw.gov.au/Details/C2006A00158/Html/Text#para...
- ewindisch 11y agoBig Buck Bunny is from a number of films by the Blender Foundation. They also made the live-action movie Tears of Steel, which can be downloaded uncompressed: http://media.xiph.org/tearsofsteel/ http://media.xiph.org/tearsofsteel/
- ksec 11y agoNo one discuss the patents and licensing problem of HEVC? Would you have to pay for those patents if you 1. Use Software Encoder / Decoder? 2. User FPGA / OpenCL accelerated encoder / decoder?