Software and Hardware Encoding of Omnidirectional 8K Video: A Performance Study

Omnidirectional (360-degree) video streaming has been on the rise dramatically in recent years. As a result, demand on the monitoring and evaluation of the visual quality of such videos is rapidly increasing. This paper deals with the performance study of hardware and software encoders for 360° video in resolution 8K, especially in terms of encoding speed on a consumer computer. New encoding standards significantly improve encoding efficiency, but also increase encoding time due to increased computational complexity. In this work, different implementations of the High Efficiency Video Codec (HEVC) for 360° videos at SK resolution are compared. Next, quality presets that balance visual quality and encoding speed at the same bitrate are also considered. Netflix’s Video Multimethod Assessment Fusion (VMAF) objective metric is used to measure video quality. Furthermore, attention is devoted to the study of power consumption and encoding speed, considering CPU and GPU performance limitations. The results show that hardware encoders can encode 8K360° videos in realtime with quality comparable to software encoding using x265 compression. However, the encoding speed is approximately 20 times faster.