Second Annual MSU MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 Video Codec Comparison

For people, who make real research in field of high-end video compression and professionally use videocodecs

• Project head: Dr. Dmitriy Vatolin
• Testing, charts, analysis: Dmitriy Kulikov, Alexander Parshin
• Translation: Artem Titarenko
• Verification: Stanislav Soldatov

See NEW VERSION on Fourth Annual H.264/AVC comparison page!

See also Frequently Asked Questions. Second annual MPEG4-AVC/H.264 codecs comparison

Codecs that were tested

• DivX 6.0 (Not H.264 video codec, tested as reference codec)
• ArcSoft H.264
• Ateme H.264
• ATI H.264
• Elecard H.264
• Fraunhofer IIS H.264
• VSS H.264
• x264

Comparison content

• During testing following metrics were measured:
  • PSNR (Y, U, V, L, R, G, B components)
  • SSIM (Y component)
  • VQM (Y component)
  • Blurring (Y, U, V components)
  • Blocking (Y, U, V components)
• Two codec presets will be compared:
  • “Maximum quality”
  • “Balanced” (speed)
• Video sequences that were used in this comparison
  • “foreman” (standard sequence)
  • “susi” (standard sequence)
  • “BBC” (standard sequence)
  • “battle” (part from “Terminator-2” movie)
  • “simpsons” (part from “The Simpsons” movie)
  • “Matrix” (part from “The Matrix” movie)
  • “Concert” (part from HDTV movie)
• Testing rules:
  • Restrictions of codecs’ operation: only codecs that can work in Main profile of H.264 and do not use two passes were tested.
  • Every codec was tested three times with separate speed measurements. After this median of these three values (middle value) was used as a resulting time.
  • Following 10 bitrates were used for codec testing (Kbps): 100, 225, 340, 460, 700, 938, 1140, 1340, 1840, 2340.
  • During testing three types of video sequences were used:
    • Source sequences *.yuv in YUV 4:2:0 format.
    • *.avi sequences in YUV 4:2:0 format with fourcc “YV12”.
    • *.yuv sequences with duplicated last frame. These sequences were used for testing x264 codec.
  • In this testing VirtualDub version 1.6.10 was used.
  • In this testing AviSynth version 2.55 was used.
  • For all metrics’ measurements in this test special build of MSU Video Quality Measurement Tool was used.
  • For each preset both speed and quality were measured

Comparison statistis

• Total number of graphs in this comparison is 3796. Only 82 (2%) of them are in document;
• The number of computer-days is more than 20;
• Final document has 85 pages.

Content of HTML version

• Introduction
  • Thanks
  • Overview
  • Goal and testing rules
  • Sequences
  • Codecs
• “Best quality” preset
  • Y-PSNR
  • U-PSNR, V-PSNR
  • SSIM, VQM
  • Blurring measure, blocking measure
  • Bitrate handling
  • Time
• “Best speed” preset
  • Y-PSNR
  • Speed/Quality Tradeoff
  • Bitrate handling
  • Time
• Final part
  • 2-pass mode and High profile
  • Per frame comparison
  • Visual comparison
  • Informal codec comparison
  • General conclusions

Download

Second Annual MSU H.264 Video Codec Comparison - PDF (3.81 Mb)

Second Annual MSU H.264 Video Codec Comparison - ZIP (3.0 Mb)

Contacts

E-mail:

• videocodec-testing@graphics.cs.msu.ru
• video@graphics.cs.msu.su