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Netflix: VP9 Codec Can Beat H.265/HEVC at 1080p or Higher Resolutions

posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday August 30 2016, @03:42AM   Printer-friendly
from the moar-pixels dept.

takyon writes:

Google's VP9 codec can (sometimes) outperform H.265/HEVC at higher resolutions:

Netflix, being one of the biggest video streaming services in the world, tested how efficient various video codecs are for a given level of quality. The company discovered that the royalty-free VP9 codec developed primarily by Google is almost as efficient as HEVC, and can sometimes be even better at resolutions of 1080p and higher.

[...] Both HEVC and VP9 promise about 50% bitrate savings for the same quality compared to h.264, but Netflix wanted to test for itself to see if this is true. Netflix sampled 5,000 12-second clips from its catalog, which includes a wide range of genres and signal characteristics. With three codecs, two configurations, three resolutions (480p, 720p and 1080p), and eight quality levels per configuration-resolution pair, the company had more than 200 million encoded frames. Netflix applied six quality metrics: PSNR, PSNRMSE, SSIM, MS-SSIM, VIF and VMAF. This resulted in more than half a million bitrate-quality curves. Netflix's unused cloud-based encoding infrastructure allowed the company to complete this large test in only a few weeks.

The company learned that previous research showing up to 50% bitrate savings for both HEVC and VP9 compared to h.264 turned out to be true. HEVC's x265 implementation outperformed VP9's libvpx for most resolutions and quality metrics. However, at the 1080p resolution, the difference was either much smaller (in HEVC's favor), or, in some cases, VP9 even beat HEVC in bitrate savings. The fact that VP9 performs better at 1080p or higher is not a major surprise, considering VP9 was optimized for resolutions beyond HD. Google is currently using it for YouTube, where all videos are encoded in VP9.

As the article notes, new codecs are coming. Here's a little more about VP10.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 30 2016, @08:45AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 30 2016, @08:45AM (#395185)

    VP9’s predecessor, the VP8 codec, failed to gain traction because it arrived much later than h.264, and because chip makers weren’t too interested in utilizing hardware accelerators for it. This has changed somewhat with VP9, as more and more chips come out with accelerated decoding, and even encoding, for VP9.