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

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: 3, Interesting) by Lunix Nutcase on Tuesday August 30 2016, @12:38PM

    by Lunix Nutcase (3913) on Tuesday August 30 2016, @12:38PM (#395233)

    H.265 is also optimized for >1080p. Hence why it's the codec for 4k BluRay.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by FatPhil on Tuesday August 30 2016, @01:10PM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Tuesday August 30 2016, @01:10PM (#395245) Homepage
    I'm curious why the headline is presented as "one time out of ten, A is better than B". The more important thing to take away from this story is that "almost always, B is better than A", surely? Does google somehow need to whore for publicity now?
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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 30 2016, @01:41PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 30 2016, @01:41PM (#395258)

      If one time out of ten A is better than B maybe the advantage is that for that one time you can switch.

      For the nine times out of ten that B is better or equivalent then you can deliver your content in B. For the one time out of ten that A is better you can then deliver your content in A. You get the best of both worlds.

    • (Score: 1) by Francis on Tuesday August 30 2016, @01:49PM

      by Francis (5544) on Tuesday August 30 2016, @01:49PM (#395263)

      I'm not really sure what the point of VP9 is if it requires greater than 1080p in order to be better than the alternatives that were optimized for resolutions that people actually use.

      The 4k format for monitors, movie theaters and production work, not for watching TV and movies at home. If you're sitting so close that you can actually see the difference, then you're giving up a ton of the resolution at the sides to the eyes' natural lack of detailed peripheral vision. A typical person's eyes are sharpest in an angle of about 3 degrees, anything outside of that isn't going to be very sharp.

      • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Tuesday August 30 2016, @03:06PM

        by RamiK (1813) on Tuesday August 30 2016, @03:06PM (#395298)

        The point is that VP9 is royalty free.

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