6 ms·

A Sneak Peek Comparison of x264, x265, and libvpx

156 points by babak_ap 10y ago

hackuser 10y ago
Firefox tells me: Secure Connection Failed EDIT: No idea why it would redirect me to https. I only clicked the link like everyone else.
- tantalor 10y ago
  It's not secure, it's http...
- edmorley 10y ago
  Noscript causes this for some reason
  - hackuser 10y ago
    I do have NoScript, but I don't know what NoScript feature would force this page to httpS.
    - clouddrover 10y ago
      Probably the HTTPS enforcement: https://noscript.net/faq#qa6_3 https://noscript.net/faq#qa6_3
      - hackuser 10y ago
        Thanks. Wow, can NoScript be unpredictable. 1) Forbid active web content unless it comes from a secure (HTTPS) connection would, I assume, block the active elements, not redirect the entire page to HTTPS. 2) I had it set as: Forbid active web content unless it comes from a secure (HTTPS) connection = Never You'd think that would disable it, but according the question just above the one you linked, Never apparently means Always unless the site is whitelisted: ---- Open NoScript Options|Advanced|HTTPS|Behavior, click under Forbid active web content unless it comes from a secure (HTTPS) connection and choose one among: 1. Never - every site matching your whitelist gets allowed to run active content. 2. When using a proxy (recommended with Tor) - only whitelisted sites which are being served through HTTPS are allowed when coming through a proxy. This way, even if an evil node in your proxy chain manages to spoof a site in your whitelist, it won't be allowed to run active content anyway. 3. Always - no page loaded by a plain HTTP or FTP connection is allowed.
broodbucket 10y ago
the second "x264" in the title should be "x265", was very confusing to parse
corysama 10y ago
> x265 outperforms libvpx for almost all resolutions and quality metrics, but the performance gap narrows (or even reverses) at 1080p. It's not clear if this means libvpx is sometimes better than x265 at resolutions > 1080p or <= 1080p. I think the author intended "occasionally better when <= 1080p"
- MBCook 10y ago
  I read it as "at 1080p they become equal or libvpx is better"
  - sirclueless 10y ago
    Right, the question is which direction you are going when you hit 1080p. Are you going down from 4k? Or up from 720p. In context, it's likely they mean "1080p [or higher]", but it's arguably ambiguous.
- uraza 10y ago
  It's a little more clear in the abstract. (At http://spie.org/OPO/conferencedetails/digital-image-processing#session-7 http://spie.org/OPO/conferencedetails/digital-image-processi...) > x265 outperforms libvpx in most cases, but the performance gap narrows (or even reverses) at the higher resolutions. So libvpx is sometimes better than x265 at resolutions > 1080p.
- wallacoloo 10y ago
  It sounds as though they tested at only 3 discrete resolutions (none of which were > 1080p, btw), so I think it's a strict equality.
oDot 10y ago
Any news from Daala?
- dkbrk 10y ago
  There was a blog post a few months ago: [0] It looks like there have been a few dead ends -- clever ideas that for one reason or another didn't pan out -- but overall, it's making solid progress. It remains, however, very experimental and is far from complete. One area in which Daala works very well right now is in compression of still images. There's a demo at the bottom of the page which shows it as much better than HEVC for that purpose, and you can also see how the codec has improved over time. Of course, the relative goodness of codecs isn't necessarily consistent over widely varying bitrates. In some of the earlier posts the Daala researchers expressed the belief that the quantitative metrics often don't accurately correspond to subjective perception of quality. Netflix seems to be putting a lot of work into developing better metrics [1], but the Daala researchers seem to rely on subjective A-B tests as the 'gold standard'. [0]: https://people.xiph.org/~jm/daala/revisiting/ https://people.xiph.org/~jm/daala/revisiting/ [1]: http://techblog.netflix.com/2016/06/toward-practical-perceptual-video.html http://techblog.netflix.com/2016/06/toward-practical-percept...
- clouddrover 10y ago
  I think they're treating Daala as a research platform these days. AV1 is the future for video on the web and code from Daala has been contributed to it. AV1 is based on ideas from VP10 and Daala: 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOMedia_Video_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOMedia_Video_1 2. https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/netvc/charter/ https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/netvc/charter/ 3. http://aomedia.org/ http://aomedia.org/ 4. https://aomedia.googlesource.com/ https://aomedia.googlesource.com/
- keeperofdakeys 10y ago
  From what I understood, Daala was never meant to be a competitor to x265, but a research project that could create a competitor for the next generation, while using no techniques that could questionably come under current patents.
angryasian 10y ago
I imagine the biggest difficulty is the licensing for x265. It may have changed now but from last I knew they wanted a royalty from streaming services monetizing the use of x265.
sergiotapia 10y ago
@dang: Can you update the second x264 to x265 in the title? --- The only bad thing I've ever heard about x265 is that it needs beefier hardware compared to x264. Otherwise it's better in every regard. Is this true?
- dogma1138 10y ago
  It doesn't need beefier hardware its just not implemented in most SOCs or GPUs so it uses software decoding. X264 was also a hog when it didn't had dedicated hardware decoders now everything even your microwave can probably decode it in hardware.
- loeg 10y ago
  I think the patents covering x265 might be younger, too.
- tracker1 10y ago
  It depends... the better the input and larger the resolution, the better x265 works for a given display. On the other side, I recently started re-ripping my DVDs of Babylon 5 for seasons 4-5 (had already watched seasons 1-3 on dvd) via Handbrake. I had to play a lot with the settings, and found that for DVD, a constant quality level 18 at medium seemed to work about best without losing too much quality. This resulted in a file size anywhere from around 290mb to 390mb, so some variance in size, for local data store this works fine, for online streams this wouldn't work as well, and would probably want a 2-pass for a consistent bitrate. This is compared to an average 850mb or so file size for the prior rip to x264. The time to encode (i7 4770k) seems to be about 13-16 minutes per episode. Again, this is at DVD source/output quality. At 1080p, you can lower the quality to around 22-24, and get near blue-ray output... the flatter the input (animation is a great example) the bigger the difference. I'm seeing encodes at 40-60% of comparable blue-ray. The down side, is it is significantly slower, and the quality of the x265 version of the codec is much better than say the nvidia x265 encoder, which is a shame as it's much slower too, so it becomes kind of a non-option for archives imho. If you are encoding new media for your library, definitely go x265, it's worth the file size saving (so long as your playback devices support it well enough), but I wouldn't go back and re-encode it all, it's just too slow for now... maybe if x264 gets some CUDA support, that would be really nice (recently upgraded to a 1080 GTX).
jjcm 10y ago
I'm sad they skipped out on a 4k resolution test. I'd really like to see how they compare at those resolutions or higher, since really x265 isn't really going to be ubiquitous in hardware for another couple years. At that time 4k should (hopefully) be the standard, or at the very least will be a common use case.
- voltagex_ 10y ago
  >We will also follow-up with a more detailed tech blog post and extend the results to include 4K encodes.
  - jjcm 10y ago
    Ah excellent. Saw the presentation info stuff and stopped reading. Glad to see it - plenty of debates among friends about the actual performance of h265 at 4k, so I'm excited that they're doing it.
merb 10y ago
> x265 outperforms libvpx for almost all resolutions and quality metrics, but the performance gap narrows (or even reverses) at 1080p. if you only read the TL;DR part i.e. What did we learn? You think wow that's bad for libvpx. Than you read: > 3 resolutions (480p, 720p and 1080p) And think... well not that bad. 2/3 vs 1/2 isn't bad.
cmaxwell 10y ago
I did some video re-encoding for a small side project I worked on last winter and ended up using x265. I really wanted VP9 to be an acceptable option but the encoding times were ridiculous...like 5x slower than the equivalent quality in x265.
inthewoods 10y ago
I find it odd that Netflix is using Youtube and Periscope to do their broadcast. I get that that is where the audience is - but I'm surprised they aren't also broadcasting it using their own tech.
- hackcasual 10y ago
  Live video streaming isn't in their wheelhouse.
  - inthewoods 10y ago
    Oh I get that, but I'd expect some sort of hack on it.
- j1vms 10y ago
  On the contrary, I always find it refreshing to see companies use each others existing tech - particularly, when they don't have anything new/worthwhile to offer end-users (in this case, a dev audience) other than introducing an unnecessary inconvenience or dependency.
- mikeryan 10y ago
  Frequently the conference organizers will be handling the AV setup for an event. Its likely much easier and common to get this content onto Periscope, and YouTube for those folks then some custom Netflix deal.
IntelMiner 10y ago
I've been playing around with reencoding all my media to H.265/HEVC at home. The space savings over the older H.264 are around 50% (or better!) depending on what I encode I have a lot of digitized box sets of TV shows, things like The Simpsons or King of the Hill. Most bit torrent copies of these shows weigh in at about 180MB/episode (for a 480P video) Encoding them through H.265 using NVIDIA's "Nvenc" encoder (CPU encoding is paaaainfully slow) I can get them down to a mere 60MB on average, with no discernible quality difference Moving up to 1080P files, I encoded some Star Trek: The Next Generation digital remasters, they shrunk from 600MB to about 350-400MB. Not quite as impressive, though I had to scale up the quality as HEVC was wrecking havoc on some of the low contrast areas (like character uniforms turning into one flat smeared looking color)
- agumonkey 10y ago
  Did you make screenshot by any luck ? btw: a 1080p episode (30min?) at 400MB is impressive enough for me.
  - IntelMiner 10y ago
    I'll post some screenshots when I get home from work :)

156 points by babak_ap 10y ago

Firefox tells me: Secure Connection Failed EDIT: No idea why it would redirect me to https. I only clicked the link like everyone else.

tantalor 10y ago
It's not secure, it's http...
edmorley 10y ago
Noscript causes this for some reason
- hackuser 10y ago
  I do have NoScript, but I don't know what NoScript feature would force this page to httpS.
  - clouddrover 10y ago
    Probably the HTTPS enforcement: https://noscript.net/faq#qa6_3 https://noscript.net/faq#qa6_3
    - hackuser 10y ago
      Thanks. Wow, can NoScript be unpredictable. 1) Forbid active web content unless it comes from a secure (HTTPS) connection would, I assume, block the active elements, not redirect the entire page to HTTPS. 2) I had it set as: Forbid active web content unless it comes from a secure (HTTPS) connection = Never You'd think that would disable it, but according the question just above the one you linked, Never apparently means Always unless the site is whitelisted: ---- Open NoScript Options|Advanced|HTTPS|Behavior, click under Forbid active web content unless it comes from a secure (HTTPS) connection and choose one among: 1. Never - every site matching your whitelist gets allowed to run active content. 2. When using a proxy (recommended with Tor) - only whitelisted sites which are being served through HTTPS are allowed when coming through a proxy. This way, even if an evil node in your proxy chain manages to spoof a site in your whitelist, it won't be allowed to run active content anyway. 3. Always - no page loaded by a plain HTTP or FTP connection is allowed.

broodbucket 10y ago

the second "x264" in the title should be "x265", was very confusing to parse

corysama 10y ago

> x265 outperforms libvpx for almost all resolutions and quality metrics, but the performance gap narrows (or even reverses) at 1080p. It's not clear if this means libvpx is sometimes better than x265 at resolutions > 1080p or <= 1080p. I think the author intended "occasionally better when <= 1080p"

MBCook 10y ago
I read it as "at 1080p they become equal or libvpx is better"
- sirclueless 10y ago
  Right, the question is which direction you are going when you hit 1080p. Are you going down from 4k? Or up from 720p. In context, it's likely they mean "1080p [or higher]", but it's arguably ambiguous.
uraza 10y ago
It's a little more clear in the abstract. (At http://spie.org/OPO/conferencedetails/digital-image-processing#session-7 http://spie.org/OPO/conferencedetails/digital-image-processi...) > x265 outperforms libvpx in most cases, but the performance gap narrows (or even reverses) at the higher resolutions. So libvpx is sometimes better than x265 at resolutions > 1080p.
wallacoloo 10y ago
It sounds as though they tested at only 3 discrete resolutions (none of which were > 1080p, btw), so I think it's a strict equality.

oDot 10y ago

Any news from Daala?

dkbrk 10y ago
There was a blog post a few months ago: [0] It looks like there have been a few dead ends -- clever ideas that for one reason or another didn't pan out -- but overall, it's making solid progress. It remains, however, very experimental and is far from complete. One area in which Daala works very well right now is in compression of still images. There's a demo at the bottom of the page which shows it as much better than HEVC for that purpose, and you can also see how the codec has improved over time. Of course, the relative goodness of codecs isn't necessarily consistent over widely varying bitrates. In some of the earlier posts the Daala researchers expressed the belief that the quantitative metrics often don't accurately correspond to subjective perception of quality. Netflix seems to be putting a lot of work into developing better metrics [1], but the Daala researchers seem to rely on subjective A-B tests as the 'gold standard'. [0]: https://people.xiph.org/~jm/daala/revisiting/ https://people.xiph.org/~jm/daala/revisiting/ [1]: http://techblog.netflix.com/2016/06/toward-practical-perceptual-video.html http://techblog.netflix.com/2016/06/toward-practical-percept...
clouddrover 10y ago
I think they're treating Daala as a research platform these days. AV1 is the future for video on the web and code from Daala has been contributed to it. AV1 is based on ideas from VP10 and Daala: 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOMedia_Video_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOMedia_Video_1 2. https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/netvc/charter/ https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/netvc/charter/ 3. http://aomedia.org/ http://aomedia.org/ 4. https://aomedia.googlesource.com/ https://aomedia.googlesource.com/
keeperofdakeys 10y ago
From what I understood, Daala was never meant to be a competitor to x265, but a research project that could create a competitor for the next generation, while using no techniques that could questionably come under current patents.

angryasian 10y ago

I imagine the biggest difficulty is the licensing for x265. It may have changed now but from last I knew they wanted a royalty from streaming services monetizing the use of x265.

sergiotapia 10y ago

@dang: Can you update the second x264 to x265 in the title? --- The only bad thing I've ever heard about x265 is that it needs beefier hardware compared to x264. Otherwise it's better in every regard. Is this true?

dogma1138 10y ago
It doesn't need beefier hardware its just not implemented in most SOCs or GPUs so it uses software decoding. X264 was also a hog when it didn't had dedicated hardware decoders now everything even your microwave can probably decode it in hardware.
loeg 10y ago
I think the patents covering x265 might be younger, too.
tracker1 10y ago
It depends... the better the input and larger the resolution, the better x265 works for a given display. On the other side, I recently started re-ripping my DVDs of Babylon 5 for seasons 4-5 (had already watched seasons 1-3 on dvd) via Handbrake. I had to play a lot with the settings, and found that for DVD, a constant quality level 18 at medium seemed to work about best without losing too much quality. This resulted in a file size anywhere from around 290mb to 390mb, so some variance in size, for local data store this works fine, for online streams this wouldn't work as well, and would probably want a 2-pass for a consistent bitrate. This is compared to an average 850mb or so file size for the prior rip to x264. The time to encode (i7 4770k) seems to be about 13-16 minutes per episode. Again, this is at DVD source/output quality. At 1080p, you can lower the quality to around 22-24, and get near blue-ray output... the flatter the input (animation is a great example) the bigger the difference. I'm seeing encodes at 40-60% of comparable blue-ray. The down side, is it is significantly slower, and the quality of the x265 version of the codec is much better than say the nvidia x265 encoder, which is a shame as it's much slower too, so it becomes kind of a non-option for archives imho. If you are encoding new media for your library, definitely go x265, it's worth the file size saving (so long as your playback devices support it well enough), but I wouldn't go back and re-encode it all, it's just too slow for now... maybe if x264 gets some CUDA support, that would be really nice (recently upgraded to a 1080 GTX).

jjcm 10y ago

I'm sad they skipped out on a 4k resolution test. I'd really like to see how they compare at those resolutions or higher, since really x265 isn't really going to be ubiquitous in hardware for another couple years. At that time 4k should (hopefully) be the standard, or at the very least will be a common use case.

voltagex_ 10y ago
>We will also follow-up with a more detailed tech blog post and extend the results to include 4K encodes.
- jjcm 10y ago
  Ah excellent. Saw the presentation info stuff and stopped reading. Glad to see it - plenty of debates among friends about the actual performance of h265 at 4k, so I'm excited that they're doing it.

merb 10y ago

> x265 outperforms libvpx for almost all resolutions and quality metrics, but the performance gap narrows (or even reverses) at 1080p. if you only read the TL;DR part i.e. What did we learn? You think wow that's bad for libvpx. Than you read: > 3 resolutions (480p, 720p and 1080p) And think... well not that bad. 2/3 vs 1/2 isn't bad.

cmaxwell 10y ago

I did some video re-encoding for a small side project I worked on last winter and ended up using x265. I really wanted VP9 to be an acceptable option but the encoding times were ridiculous...like 5x slower than the equivalent quality in x265.

inthewoods 10y ago

I find it odd that Netflix is using Youtube and Periscope to do their broadcast. I get that that is where the audience is - but I'm surprised they aren't also broadcasting it using their own tech.

hackcasual 10y ago
Live video streaming isn't in their wheelhouse.
- inthewoods 10y ago
  Oh I get that, but I'd expect some sort of hack on it.
j1vms 10y ago
On the contrary, I always find it refreshing to see companies use each others existing tech - particularly, when they don't have anything new/worthwhile to offer end-users (in this case, a dev audience) other than introducing an unnecessary inconvenience or dependency.
mikeryan 10y ago
Frequently the conference organizers will be handling the AV setup for an event. Its likely much easier and common to get this content onto Periscope, and YouTube for those folks then some custom Netflix deal.

IntelMiner 10y ago

I've been playing around with reencoding all my media to H.265/HEVC at home. The space savings over the older H.264 are around 50% (or better!) depending on what I encode I have a lot of digitized box sets of TV shows, things like The Simpsons or King of the Hill. Most bit torrent copies of these shows weigh in at about 180MB/episode (for a 480P video) Encoding them through H.265 using NVIDIA's "Nvenc" encoder (CPU encoding is paaaainfully slow) I can get them down to a mere 60MB on average, with no discernible quality difference Moving up to 1080P files, I encoded some Star Trek: The Next Generation digital remasters, they shrunk from 600MB to about 350-400MB. Not quite as impressive, though I had to scale up the quality as HEVC was wrecking havoc on some of the low contrast areas (like character uniforms turning into one flat smeared looking color)

agumonkey 10y ago
Did you make screenshot by any luck ? btw: a 1080p episode (30min?) at 400MB is impressive enough for me.
- IntelMiner 10y ago
  I'll post some screenshots when I get home from work :)