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Comment by asb | Hacker News Reader

It's a shame the royalty-free VP9 wasn't also included in this comparison.

Moscow State University has a more broad test (including VP9) here if you're interested: http://compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/hevc_2015/MSU_H...

You might find this an interesting read (PDF): http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/200925/files/article-vp9-s...

tl;dr vp9 is competitive with h.264 but not h.265

It seems a lot closer to h.265 than h.264, but still worse than it in all trials here. Give them another revision or two, they can probably beat it.

How do the complexity requirements compare? H.265 decoders have memory for lots of previous frames, but VP9 could be at a handicap if the format limits backward references to just a few frames.

VP10 is in active development, though I don't know how far along it is.

Real tl;dr:

We downloaded a random git commit a year before a release was made and claimed it was officially released. Best case scenario, we don't understand the difference between a spec and implementation being finalized. Worst case: intentional hatchet job.

This paper is quite old and has known problems with setting a constant quantizer for VP9. The results do not match my own findings comparing libvpx and x265 at all [1]. libvpx VP9 is still worse than x265, but the difference is quite small.

[1] https://arewecompressedyet.com/

BBC apparently does not consider VP9 to be a major video coding standard.

>The High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard has been developed jointly by the two standardisation bodies ITU and ISO (as has been the practice with all major video coding standards in the past 3 decades);

And that's probably the right call for the BBC. Hopefully they'll get behind the NetVC [1] effort and support that in the future. The NetVC codec is to be built from Daala and Thor, and maybe VP10 as well. To complement NetVC there's also the Alliance for Open Media [2], but I'm a bit disappointed that the only public output from AOMedia so far seems to be a press release from September last year.

1. https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/netvc/documents/

2. http://aomedia.org/

But there are no software patents in UK so all these formats must be free for BBC until they will use patented dedicated hardware.

>But there are no software patents in UK

This has never been true for video. Even as far back as MPEG-2, the MPEG-LA has had GB patent numbers (as well as most other European countries).

The software doesn't really matter all of these encoders will have hardware implementations which will incur royalties.

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