Compression Performance Comparison of x264, x265, libvpx and aomenc for On-Demand Adaptive Streaming Applications

Abstract

Video compression standard H.264/AVC was released in 2003, and has been dominating the industry for the past decade. Over the last few years, a number of next-generation standards/formats like VP9 (2012), H.265/HEVC (2013) and AV1 (2018) were introduced, all claiming significant improvement over H.264/AVC. In this paper, we present our evaluation of the performance of these compression standards. Our evaluation is conducted using open-source encoder implementations of these standards, x264 (for H.264/AVC), x265 (for H.265/HEVC), libvpx (for VP9) and aomenc (for AV1). The process is designed to evaluate the attainable compression efficiency for on-demand adaptive streaming applications. Results with two different quality metrics, PSNR and VMAF, are reported. Our results reveal that x265, libvpx and aomenc all achieve substantial compression efficiency improvement over x264.