Moscow State University Releases 10th HEVC Video Codec Comparison (compression.ru) 51
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.
Can't wait until they become popular (Score:2)
There is a cost with all that (Score:5, Informative)
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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. :)
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Most of the major Chinese semiconductor design companies already produce mid-range SoCs capable of decoding 4K HE [wikipedia.org]
Re:There is a cost with all that (Score:4, 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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Whilst this is currently true, the situation is improving rapidly. I've been periodically testing the OpenELEC Kodi Jarvis alpha builds [forum.kodi.tv] 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 s
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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.
X264 still relevant (Score:1)
Re:X264 still relevant (Score:4, 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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...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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> 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 confide
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This will blow your mind:
http://www.gram.edu/ [gram.edu]
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There is a Moscow Oblast [wikipedia.org], which would be an equivalent of state. Although Russia has quite an hierarchy of divisions from federal district to federal subject. [wikipedia.org]
The other explanation is that 'state' is synonymous w/ government, and that this university is run by the government in Moscow.
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My x265 Experience - Poor (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.
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Still won't work in Internet Explorer (Score:2)
How the hell does Microsoft manage to get away so such dismal compatibility?
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No web browser supports H.265 (aka HEVC) video. In contrast Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and soon Microsoft Edge [windows.com] support VP9 video. So don't worry about H.265 for browsers. Just use VP9 and be happy.
Patents (Score:3)
Doesn't matter how good x265 is, as long as patent litigation clouds keep forming over it, it will not succeed.
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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
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Are We Compressed Yet [arewecompressedyet.com] 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 [ietf.org]. To me the Daala encoded image looks better and captures more detail, but it scores worse on the objective metric.