HEVC, VP9, AV1, and VVC: Presenting a Codec Update in 11 Charts
One major concern I had with AV1 in my First Looks review was playback CPU requirements. For the most part, these were allayed. Figure 7 shows CPU requirements playing back 1080p video on the same notebook I used for the review (HP ZBook notebook powered by a 2.8 GHz Intel Xeon E3-1505M v5 CPU with an NVIDIA Quadro M1000M graphics chipset along with the HD Graphics 530 GPU embedded in the CPU). At 20 percent, c’mon in, the water’s fine.
Figure 7. AV1 playback overhead was minimal on my HP ZBook (whew!).
On most of the videos I played, I had no issues. On two, however—the Halo Trailer and Hello Sexy Pants (it’s research, people!)—I had severe issues, including slow downs and stoppages. These didn’t appear to be related to either CPU or network issues, so I’m not sure what was going on.
You see the frames dropped in Halo in Figure 8; this screen grab is from the ZBook, but I got the same results on my 40-core Z840 workstation, seemingly indicating that it’s not a CPU issue.
Figure 8. I had severe issues with the Halo trailer.
Figure 9 shows the frame drops in Hello Sexy Pants. Note that playback on all other videos that I tried was problem free, which left me scratching my head.
Figure 9. And the Hello Sexy Pants music video.
The major point is, however, that AV1 will likely play on a whole lot more machines than I originally thought, which is a good thing. Kudos to the AV1 and Chrome teams for making this happen. That said, without major reductions in encoding time that appear to be coming soon, AV1 is still only appropriate for publishers who routinely get seven figure views for their videos. I look forward to testing with Firefox in the near future.
AV1 Encoding Speed Increase is Coming
At press time, we saw a tweet from Bitmovin CIO and co-founder Christian Timmerer, who was attending the 2018 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing running October 7 to 10, 2018 in Athens, Greece. One presentation discussed performance enhancements with the AV1 codec, and Timmerer posted the slide shown in Figure 10.
You can read as well as I that the improvements appear substantial. We’ll verify them when they make their way into FFmpeg. For the record, in our AV1 First Look, we encoded with cpu-used=0, and AV1 encoding time was about 1,000 times longer than VP9. Dropping that to 40x would dramatically change the breakeven point for AV1 encoding and make the codec useful to a much broader group of producers.
Figure 10. Performance enhancements for AV1 encode and decode.
Versatile Video Coding is Coming (and So Are the AV1 Quality Challenges)
At IBC, AOMedia member BBC discussed a paper showing that AV1 had only a 2 to 7 percent quality advantage over HEVC (HM in Figure 9) and that the upcoming Versatile Video Coding technology (JEM in the figure) averaged about 25 percent savings over AV1 and 31.5 percent over HEVC. As a broadcaster and AOMedia member, BBC obviously has lots of credibility and these results are disappointing for AV1 and impressive for VVC. You can read more about BBC’s tests. Harmonic and Ateme also released papers with less than favorable results for AV1. Of course, absent a major shift in royalty policy, VVC may find itself hobbled by the same uncertainty that stunted HEVC’s growth, and VVC deployments are years away.
Figure 11. VVC (JEM) is coming, and BBC says it’s looking good.
As the commercial antithesis of the hugely unpopular HEVC codec, AV1 has enjoyed breathless approval from much of the technology press, and as evidenced by the Bitmovin survey, by many in the user community as well. At some point, however, the codec has to prove itself both within and beyond its founding members. It’s still early days, and AOM has made some impressive performance gains, but we look forward to observing the bitrates used by actual deployments at scale to identify the real world benefits that the codec delivers.
Related Articles
Anytime you start working with a new codec, there are some fundamental tests that you should run to achieve optimal performance/quality optimization. In this article, I'll take you through those tests while encoding VVC using a version of FFmpeg that includes the Fraunhofer VVC codec.
21 Mar 2023
As recent lawsuits regarding DASH-related patents make clear, royalty payments on adaptive bitrate streaming are inevitable—even if it's not yet clear who'll be paying who, or how much
02 Dec 2019
Advance testing shows the codec producing strong bitrate savings over its competitors, but a tiered licensing model could prevent all users from enjoying the best performance.
14 Nov 2019
The old realities that used to dictate codec adoption no longer apply. Opening up new markets now matters more than reducing operating expenses. How are HEVC, AV1, and VVC positioned for the future?
16 Aug 2019
Demos and conversations at Streaming Media East showed that HEVC is an excellent technology, and there's real anger around its disfunctional royalty policies.
22 May 2019
Advances in video codec technology driven by the explosion in video over IP are creating heated competition and a fragmented market. Will one winner emerge or is this the new normal?
04 Apr 2019
Sisvel's Video Codec Licensing Platform will employ a "committed volume scheme" rather than a royalty cap, according to CEO Mattia Fogliacco, who did not rule out royalties on software-based encoding
28 Mar 2019
The first tests of AV1 showed glacial encoding times that seriously detracted from the codec's usability. But since then encoding times have improved enough that AV1 is almost usable—and we've got the charts to prove it.
04 Mar 2019
Looking back and the successes and misfires of H.264, HEVC, and VP9 show what the industry can expect from AV1 and VVC.
07 Dec 2018
Ahead of Streaming Media West, a meeting of codec experts offers new developments in leading-edge codecs, as well as field reports from companies already using them.
26 Oct 2018
When comparing the video quality created by different codecs, consider the companies running the comparisons and the metrics they're offering.
23 Oct 2018
AV1 delivers equivalent quality to HEVC, but with a lower data rate. For now, though, it's slow. A five-second clip took 23 hours and 46 minutes to encode.
27 Sep 2018
FFmpeg 4.0 gives many video engineers their first chance to test the new AV1 codec against H.264, HEVC, and VP9. The results? In our tests, quality was impressive, but glacially slow encoding times make AV1 a non-starter for most publishers until hardware acceleration becomes available.
31 Aug 2018
H.264 still leads, HEVC is starting to gain traction, and AV1 had its coming-out party. To add to the confusion, other codecs offer alternatives to all three. Jan Ozer makes sense of all the codec news from this year's NAB.
17 Apr 2018
Companies and Suppliers Mentioned