H.264/AVC is so slow
BBC engineers have revealed their research into H.265/HEVC video compression and claim that it is 50 per cent better than the older H.264/AVC standard.
The BBC published the results and an extensive analysis of its formal verification tests of the H.265/HEVC video compression standard in the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT) journal, which we buy for the centrefold.
Apparently the BBC R&D video coding research team focused on evaluations of UHD content and analytics as part of a standardisation process.
The High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard was to provide significantly improved video compression compared with its predecessors; H.264/AVC being the most recent. This standard was ratified in 2013 as H.265 by the ITU-T and as MPEG-H Part 2 by ISO/IEC.
The subjective tests used human viewers to test the compression gains of the new video coding standard. This had normally been done objective metrics (e.g. Peak Signal to Noise Ratio – PSNR). The PSNR based computations had shown up to about 50% bit rate savings in HEVC compared to the previous standard of H.264/AVC, for similar video quality.
The subjective tests used a carefully selected set of coded video sequences at four different picture sizes: UHD (3840×2160 and 4096×2048), 1080p (1920×1080), 720p (1280×720) and 480p (832×480), at frame rates of 30Hz, 50Hz, or 60Hz. Video content was chosen to represent diverse spatial and temporal characteristics, and then coded using HEVC and AVC standards at a wide span of bit rates producing a variety of quality levels.
