A Practical Evaluation of Video Codecs for Large-Scale HTTP Adaptive Streaming Services

The number of bandwidth-hungry applications and services is constantly growing. HTTP adaptive streaming of audiovisual content accounts for the majority of today's internet traffic. Although the internet bandwidth increases also constantly, audio-visual compression technology is inevitable and we are currently facing the challenge to be confronted with multiple video codecs. This paper provides a practical evaluation of state of the art video codecs (i. e., AV1, AVC/libx264, HEVC/libx265, VP9/Iibvpx-vp9) for large-scale HTTP adaptive streaming services. In anticipation of the results, AV I shows promising performance compared to established video codecs. Additionally, AV I is intended to be royalty free making it worthwhile to be considered for large scale HTTP adaptive streaming services.