Let’s start!

Well, it’s time to write the first post!

What this resource is about.

As you might easily guess, it’s about comparing the quality of video codecs. On various forums and discussions, I often hear questions like, “I encoded a video using AV1, but the file ended up larger than the one compressed with H.264. Where are the promised 50% savings?” Such questions are perfectly logical. But they lack too much initial data for a proper answer.

Another type of question is more specific and is usually asked by people making decisions about purchasing specific hardware for use in transcoding: “What will I gain, in terms of encoding quality and speed, if I replace hardware A with hardware B? What are the features of the implemented codecs in each option under consideration?”

I hope this resource will help answer both questions. There isn’t a huge amount of hardware tested yet, but it’s the most commonly discussed. I will add new results as my time and resources allow.

To compare codecs, they need to be placed in identical conditions. I have tried to do this and described exactly how the results were obtained. The methodology description page is at https://www.vmetrix.tech/methodology/. The encoding parameters page is at https://www.vmetrix.tech/encode-parameters/.

The choice of test videos is somewhat unconventional. My goal is not to replicate the results of marketing brochures, but to see how codecs behave in the most challenging situations for them. Therefore, the test set includes videos with water ripples, fog, light gradients, and sharp transitions. There is also a “static” video that yields unexpected results with different codecs.

For encoding, I use FFMPEG – https://www.ffmpeg.org/. Currently, this is mainly version 8.0.1. In some cases, it’s a special build, like for the Orange Pi 5 Plus board with the RK3588 chip.

And finally, two links to the current results, where you can choose options for comparison. General (averaged) results – https://vmetrix.tech:3000/d/ads7nhh/bd-br-aggregated; detailed information with RD curves for a range of bitrates and scatter plots with per-frame quality – https://vmetrix.tech:3000/d/adrgpg7/rd-curves.

Please enjoy! 🙂

PS. If you notice an error, inaccuracy, or are interested in adding new hardware or a set of parameters, please contact me – I’ll be happy to help!