Eighth MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 Video Codecs Comparison - Standard Version

• Video group head: Dr. Dmitriy Vatolin
• Project head: Dr. Dmitriy Kulikov
• Measurements, analysis: Marat Arsaev

REPORT IS UPDATED! Now it contains Appendixes with GPU encoders comparison and Very High Speed Encoders comparison.

Different Versions of Report

There are two different versions of H.264 Comparison 2012 report:

• MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 Video Codecs Comparison - Standard (Free) Version (this report)
• MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 Video Codecs Comparison - Pro Version (Enterprise Edition)
  This is a pack of all the graphs with user-friendly systems for switching the graphs

Here is the comparison of the versions:

Pro version of comparison will be available immediately after report purchasing.

Video Codecs that Were Tested

H.264

• DivX H.264
• Elecard H.264
• Intel Ivy Bridge QuickSync (GPU encoder)
• MainConcept H.264 (software)
• MainConcept H.264 (CUDA based encoder)
• MainConcept H.264 (OpenCL based encoder)
• DiscretePhoton
• x264

Non H.264

• XviD (MPEG-4 ASP codec)

Overview

Sequences

Table 1. Summary of video sequences

Sequence	Number of frames	Frame rate	Resolution
VideoConference (5 sequences)
Deadline	1374	30	352x288
Developers 4CIF	3600	30	640x480
Developers 720p	1500	30	1280x720
Presentation	548	30	720x480
Business	493	30	1920x1080
Movies (10 SD sequences)
Ice Age	2014	24	720x480
City	600	60	704x576
Crew	600	60	704x576
Indiana Jones	5000	30	704x288
Harbour	600	60	704x576
Ice Skating	480	60	704x576
Soccer	600	60	704x576
Race Horses	300	30	832x480
State Enemy	6500	24	720x304
Party Scene	500	50	832x480
HDTV sequences (16 sequences)
Park Joy	500	50	1280x720
Riverbed	250	25	1920x1080
Rush Hour	500	25	1920x1080
Blue Sky	217	25	1920x1080
Station	313	25	1920x1080
Stockholm	604	50	1280x720
Sunflower	500	25	1920x1080
Tractor	690	25	1920x1080
Bunny	600	24	1920x1080
Dream	600	24	1920x1080
Troy	300	24	1920x1072
Water Drops	535	30	1920x1080
Capitol	600	30	1920x1080
Parrots	600	30	1920x1080
Citybus	600	30	1920x1080
Underwater	600	30	1920x1080

Objectives and Testing Tools

H.264 Codec Testing Objectives

The main goal of this report is the presentation of a comparative evaluation of the quality of new H.264 codecs using objective measures of assessment. The comparison was done using settings provided by the developers of each codec. The main task of the comparison is to analyze different H.264 encoders for the task of transcoding video—e.g., compressing video for personal use. Speed requirements are given for a sufficiently fast PC; fast presets are analogous to real-time encoding for a typical home-use PC.

H.264 Codec Testing Tools

The following computer configuration was used for the main tests:

Sugar Bay platform, 3rd Generation Core i7 3xxx(IVB), 4 Cores CPU @3.4 GHz,

Integrated GPU: Intel HD Graphics 4000

GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580

HDD: SSD160G

Total Physical Memory: 2x2 Gb RAM (1600 MHz)

OS Name: Microsoft Windows 7

Overall Conclusions

Overall, the leader in this comparison for software encoders is x264, followed by MainConcept, DivX H.264 and Elecard.

The overall ranking of the software codecs tested in this comparison is as follows:

1. x264
2. MainConcept
3. DivX H.264
4. Elecard
5. Intel Ivy Bridge QuickSync
6. XviD
7. DiscretePhoton
8. MainConcept CUDA

This rank is based only on the encoders’ quality results. Encoding speed is not considered here.

Professional Versions of Comparison Report

H.264 Comparison Report Pro 2012 version contains:

Additional objective metrics (PSNR, 3-SSIM, MS-SSIM)

All metrics results for all colorplanes (Y,U,V and overall)

Results for all the sequences, codecs and presets used in comparison

Much more figures

etc.

Acknowledgments

The Graphics & Media Lab Video Group would like to express its gratitude to the following companies for providing the codecs and settings used in this report:

DiscretePhoton team

Elecard Ltd

Intel Corporation

MainConcept GmbH

x264 Development Team

The Video Group would also like to thank these companies for their help and technical support during the tests.

Thanks

Special thanks to the following contributors of our previous comparisons

Codec Analysis and Tuning for Codec Developers and Codec Users

Computer Graphics and Multimedia Laboratory of Moscow State University:

10 years working in the area of video codec analysis and tuning using objective quality metrics and subjective comparisons.

20+ reports of video codec comparisons and analysis (H.264, MPEG-4 MPEG-2, decoders’ error recovery).

Methods and algorithms for codec comparison and analysis development, separate codec’s features and codec’s options analysis.

We could perform next task for codec developers and codec users.

Strong and Weak Points of Your Codec

Deep encoder parts analysis (ME, RC on GOP, mode decision, etc).

Weak and strong points for your encoder and complete information about encoding quality on different content types.

Encoding Quality improvement by the pre and post filtering (including technologies licensing).

Independent Codec Estimation Comparing to Other Codecs for Different Use-cases

Comparative analysis of your encoder and other encoders.

We have direct contact with many codec developers.

You will know place of your encoder between other newest well-known encoders (compare encoding quality, speed, bitrate handling, etc.).

Encoder Features Implementation Optimality Analysis

We perform encoder features effectiveness (speed/quality trade-off) analysis that could lead up to 30% increase in the speed/quality characteristics of your codec. We can help you to tune your codec and find best encoding parameters.

Contacts

E-mail: videocodec-testing@graphics.cs.msu.ru