Performance Analysis of H.265/HEVC (High-Efficiency Video Coding) with Reference to Other Codecs

Compression performance of a video codec is very important to enable it to encode high quality videos at low bitrates. Significant progress has been made in the area of video encoding. The latest state of the art video encoding standard, High Efficiency Video Coding -- HEVC/H.265 doubles the video quality for the same bitrate compared to other codecs. This paper presents quality & performance comparison amongst H.265, H.264 and, Motion JPEG using different video encoding libraries. Alongside the need for high compression efficiency, it is also important to keep in the computational complexity of video codecs. In this regards, although HEVC provides the best compression efficiency, it does so at the expense of significantly more computational cost than H.264. The results of the conducted experiments show that HEVC produced best quality video followed by H.264. However Motion JPEG encoding produced fastest encoding times followed by HEVC. Videos encoded with Motion JPEG using OpenJPEG library produced the worst results in terms of quality. H.264 was the slowest among the video codecs and often produced video quality comparable to videos encoded with Kakadu (Motion JPEG). This work is meant to provide insights regarding choice of the video encoding suite & future development of the codecs.