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Fourth 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

Codecs that Were Tested

XviD (MPEG-4 ASP codec)
MainConcept H.264
Intel H.264
x264
AMD H.264
Artemis H.264

Comparison Rules

All codec options and presets were provided by codec authors

An important restriction on a preset is encoding time for it. A few iterations of compliance testing and preset optimization were made to meet the requirements.

JM 9.8 reference decoder was used to decode all encoded streams.

All objective metrics measurements were performed with MSU Video Quality Measurement Tool (Pro Version)

For each preset both speed and quality were measured

Comparison Content

Following metrics were measured:

PSNR (Y component)
SSIM (Y component)

Codecs were analyzed separately in the following types of application:

“Video Conferences”
“Movies”
“HDTV”

Individual codecs’ settings were used for each of those application types.

Video sequences that were used in this comparison:

“Salesman” (standard sequence)
“Foreman” (standard sequence)
“News” (standard sequence)
“Battle” (part of “Terminator-2” movie)
“Smith” (part of “Mr. and Mrs. Smith”)
“Iceage” (part of “Ice Age”)
“lord of the rings” (part of “Lord of the Rings”)
“Troy” (part of “Troy” HDTV movie)
“Matrix” (part of “The matrix” HDTV movie)

Different Comparison Versions

Short version of report is now available at website for free download (70 pages, 76 figures). There are three customized versions:

Free Version

Base analysis for Movie usage area
RD curves
Relative Bitrate/Relative Speed graphs
Absolute encoding speed charts
Bitrate handling graphs
Short analysis for Video Conferences and HDTV (only average graphs)
Some common analysis for all the usage areas
PSNR as objective quality metric

Advanced Users Edition (Free now!)

All from Free Version
RD curves for all the usage areas
Relative Bitrate/Relative Speed graphs individually for all the usage areas
Some interesting per-frame comparison
Absolute encoding speed charts for all the usage areas
Bitrate handling graphs for all the usage areas

Enterprise (Pro) Edition (Free now!)

All from Advanced Users Edition
All sequences for all the usage areas
SSIM RD curves individually for each sequence from all the sequences
Relative Bitrate/Relative Speed graphs individually for each sequence from test set
Per-frame analysis
Specific Analysis Methods (Synthetic sequences)
All sequences, used in this comparison are provided with Pro version of report.

You can download or purchase any version in Download section.

Download & Contribution

Dear video codec professionals!
You can support this comparison by buying Professional Edition of the report or ordering the customized versions of our report. This contribution will help us: