VP8 vs H.264 – Which One is Better?

https://gist.github.com/4645784

by Hupo • 13 years ago

30 60 13 years ago

gist.github.com

Osiris• 13 years ago

Having done a lot of video encoding myself, I've found that H.264 offers the best quality, especially at lower bit rates.

I really do hope that VP9 can offer the quality of H.265. VP8 just wasn't good enough to compete against H.264.

shmerl17• 13 years ago

No, the point is it is good enough, even if in some cases it can't be as good because it has to work around software patents. Theora indeed can't compete in comparison, but VP8 surely can.

afhof3• 13 years ago

Being good enough also depends on the context that the video will be used in. For example, I have an HTML5 video site where closer to 100% of the audience is either FF or Chrome. Both support VP8 out of the box, which means I only have to keep one copy of the video to serve to all users. If I had to target more browsers, such as Safari or IE, I would have to keep two copies of every video in order to work on all browsers (or worse, use flash as a work around).

I am okay with the minor loss in quality, just for the ease of managing a lot of videos and a lot of disk space.

protomyth9• 13 years ago

Given how cable looks compared to over the air HDTV, the coming of 4k, and satellite channels even h.264 isn't good enough. VP8 won't be and h.265 is the industries answer. I would expect trouble with the adoption of VP9 given Google's moves with Mortorola's patents.

shortsightedsid• 13 years ago

Video encoders have a number of tools. It really depends on what tools you have enabled.

The standard itself doesn't specify how an encoder behaves. That leaves a lot of room for innovation on encoders. End of the day, the qp/bitrate ratio you get is encoder implementation dependent and not sometime that's specific to the standard. This is the part where most of the patents exist.

ck23• 13 years ago

Considering the sheer number of devices with h.264, it's like saying betamax is superior while everyone only has vhs.

SG-• 13 years ago

I don't quite understand, Betamax had superior quality, but in this case this article shows that h264 has more detail at the same bit rate combined with much faster encoding.

ck23• 13 years ago

Does your standalone device have vp8? All bluray devices can play h264 streams but almost never vp8.

Of course as everything switches to android this will change completely by the end of the decade, but for streaming in 2013, h264 is the better investment.

Once they move to h265 vs vp9 the point is moot but that won't be common for at least five years. The encoding requirements for those streams will also be significant.

afhof3• 13 years ago

One of the interesting things about VP8 is that its very similar to h.264. Saying that one device has hardware support for h.264 really means that it has support for some of the operations that h.264 uses; likely that same ones that VP8 uses. In fact, I am willing to bet that is why Android devices 2.3.3 and up require VP8 support; it was easy to add it in.

The ffmpeg guys wrote a VP8 decoder with 1400 lines of C because of how much they were able to reuse. From: http://blogs.gnome.org/rbultje/2010/06/27/googles-vp8-video-...

cookiecaper• 13 years ago

Only if you limit your discussion to mobile platforms. Most recent computers should be able to run VP8 video without the end user taking notice (assuming a generic player like VLC is installed), even if they have to do software decoding.

Scaevolus• 13 years ago

DarkShikari (x264 dev) has blogged about VP8 a few times: http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/category/vp8

"The first in-depth technical analysis of VP8" http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377

Hupo5• 13 years ago

That he has. My test clip choice was inspired by him[1], and I also link to another blog post of his[2] in the conclusion. That VP8 blog post is almost three years old now, though, and the comment I'm replying to in my article claimed that VP8 is better than H.264 "at this point". This is why I did my test with the latest and greatest encoders available for both formats today.

[1] http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=154430

[2] http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/472

sounds• 13 years ago

I think it would be interesting to do a follow-up comparison h264 vs VP8 for mobile. 1080p vbr targetting ~7 Mbps, 480p vbr targetting ~2.5 Mbps, etc.

It's important to explore the space a bit for discussion's sake.

afhof3• 13 years ago

His blog is very insightful. There is also another great post where he talks about how to cheat on video comparison tests ( http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/472 ). One of the things brought up in there is for still frame comparisons. If the frame came from an I frame rather than a B* or P frame in the output video, the test will be unfair.

*VP8 doesn't have B frames, similar to the h.264 baseline profile.

gillianseed4• 13 years ago

There's no doubting gasset-glaser's (DarkShikari) knowledge in these matters, but he is hardly an objective party.

Apart from being one of the developers of open source GPL licenced x264 encoder, he and the other developers are also licencing it for proprietary use (nothing wrong with that, I think it's a great way of making money out of open source development). This means that a open source royalty free codec like VP8 (and later VP9) could cut into their revenue stream.

I'm not saying that this affected the outcome of his test, but it's still context. Also his test back then was also criticized for only using one clip, here's another test with a larger set of comparisons:

http://qpsnr.youlink.org/vp8_x264/VP8_vs_x264.html

I can't vouch for the validity of this anymore than the validity of any other test.

shmerl17• 13 years ago

Let's see how Daala and VP9 work out. Something should break the domination of closed formats, and MPEG-LA obviously plan to extend their grip on the market with H.265, since patents on H.264 are going to expire. Introducing an updated format will start this whole patent lock from the beginning.

0x09• 13 years ago

Closed formats haven't dominated since the heyday of RealMedia in the late 1990s.

shmerl17• 13 years ago

Support for H.264 in the hardware is commonplace, while support for VP8 is limited to few new SoCs and is virtually absent in any video dedicated hardware. You don't see it as a domination of closed formats?

nullc2• 13 years ago

Testing with a single not very representative clip is a poor idea, See the comment on the github: https://gist.github.com/4645784#comment-756444

Hupo5• 13 years ago

>not very representative clip

I chose the clip based on what Dark_Shikari (x264 developer) had to say about it[1]:

It shouldn't bias too heavily towards any one encoder like many of the other standard test clips will:

a. It's relatively high motion, so it won't bias heavily against encoders without B-frames or qpel (as, say, mobcal does).

b. It's not so high motion that it would cripple video formats that don't support motion vectors longer than 16 pixels (e.g. Theora).

c. It's not something that benefits an unreasonably large amount from some of x264's algorithms (which is why I picked this and not parkrun).

[1] http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=154430

I could have done multiple test encodes, sure, but the problem in this case was that downloading several gigabytes of raw source material isn't exactly instant. And even if I tested with multiple clips, I doubt the conclusion would be that much different.

nullc2• 13 years ago

Because of texture this clip benefits enormously from 8x8 transforms (as well as substantially from an activity masking aware encoder). On an intra frame in prior testing Theora did enormously better than VP8 on this clip for these reasons. If your test was to compare an intraframe between vp8 / baseline h264 / and Theora, you would have concluded Theora was the best by a wide margin. But this would be an erroneous conclusion.

And sure, perhaps you'd get the same result on other clips. Over high-profile H264 the only obvious format feature that come to mind that could really let VP8 get ahead are the 'truemotion' intra-predictor and creative use of the synthetic reference frame (though I suppose the vp8 developers might have other suggestions) and I'd expect those features to only be big wins on a small number of clips so it wouldn't be hard to miss the cases where VP8 really shines over high profile h264.

But you (or I) could have said that without doing the test at all, and there would be 100% fewer clueless people going around claiming that something was proven here that wasn't. Your opinion (or mine) is a fine thing, but it's not proper to launder an opinion as fact by dressing it up in an inadequate test.

glomph• 13 years ago

That was in 2005!

Given that people do hundreds of test encodes when they actually use things like x264, I think that if you want to say anything general about these encoders you have to do more than one comparison.

bobdvb• 13 years ago

Agreed, a single video is not very representative and the results are still subjective. I would have liked these claims to be backed up by measurements like PSNR or VQM over multiple sources.

Steko• 13 years ago

Oh look another article that's been flagged into oblivion by zealots.

{currently at the bottom of page 4 when by pts it should still be in the top 10)

ksec• 13 years ago

"While I'd love a patent- and royalty-free video format to offer the highest quality compression you can find, I wouldn't hold my breath for one."

I wonder why couldn't they allow software usage ( Encoder and Decoder ) to be free. And only collect royalty on Hardware, and Industry Production use.

VP8 vs H.264 – Which One is Better?

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