Performance of H.264, H.265, VP8 and VP9 Compression Standards for High Resolutions

Recently multimedia services increase, especially in video domain, leads to requirements of quality assessment. The main factors effected that quality are compression technology and transmission link. This paper presents a coding efficiency comparison of the well-known video compression standards Advanced Video Coding (H.264/AVC), High-Efficiency Video Coding (H.265/HEVC), VP8 and VP9 using objective metrics. An extensive range of bitrates from low to high bitrates was selected and encoded. The evaluation was done for four types of sequences in high resolutions depending on content. All four video sequences were encoded by using same encoding configurations for all the examined video codecs. The results showed that the quality of all compression standards rises logarithmically with increasing bitrate – in low bitrates the quality grows faster than in high bitrates. The efficiency of the new compression standards outperforms the older ones. The efficiency of VP8 compression standard outperforms the H.264/AVC compression standard. The efficiency of H.265/HEVC and VP9 compression standards is almost the same. The results also showed that VP8 codec cannot allow encoding by low bitrates. According to the results can be also said that the efficiency of the new compression standards decreases with the resolution. The results showed that the effectiveness of compression depends on the type of test sequence.