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VP8 vs H.264 – Which One is Better?

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Re: VP8 vs H.264 – Which One is Better?

#31

Post by taligent »

shmerl wrote: post #18
Hupo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

H.264 isn't exactly "closed" per se - the standard itself is freely available[1], which is why we have great free and open source encoders and decoders for it. What you mean by "closed" is most likely just "patent-encumbered", which it most certainly is and which affects anyone wanting to use it commercially (at the moment you can use it freely for non-commercial purposes on the internet, but this may or may not chan…

By closed I mean not available for free use and distribution, for example in open source projects which can't pay any royalties. May be saying free format would sound more clear, since you are right, closed is a bit ambiguous, as it can also mean a format without published specification which needs to be reverse engineered to be used. Also, I don't think that H.264 forbids only commercial use. Can you freely distribu…

Open source projects can't pay royalties. But people who use them can be forced to.

The idea that VP8/VP9 will gain traction and remain royalty free is laughable.

Re: VP8 vs H.264 – Which One is Better?

#32

Post by shmerl »

taligent wrote: post #29
gillianseed wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google releases VP8 and VP9 with a patent and royalty free licence, so a potential patent threat will hardly come from them.

Exactly the patent threat will come from the MPEG-LA or the members directly. Because if VP9 is indeed similar to H.265 then you I would imagine a patent is being infringed somewhere. And since Google doesn't provide patent indemnification you can guarantee that some big royalties will be demanded from users.

> Exactly the patent threat will come from the MPEG-LA or the members directly. Because if VP9 is indeed similar to H.265

Why would they design the codec to be vulnerable to patent attacks? VP8 was designed to work around threats from H.264. They surely applied the same logic for VP9 since they intend it for practical use and not as theoretical brain exercise. MPEG-LA spits threats all the time, including against Theora and VP8, but they have no teeth to bite.

Re: VP8 vs H.264 – Which One is Better?

#33

Post by gillianseed »

taligent wrote: post #29
gillianseed wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google releases VP8 and VP9 with a patent and royalty free licence, so a potential patent threat will hardly come from them.

Exactly the patent threat will come from the MPEG-LA or the members directly. Because if VP9 is indeed similar to H.265 then you I would imagine a patent is being infringed somewhere. And since Google doesn't provide patent indemnification you can guarantee that some big royalties will be demanded from users.

I bet you said the same thing back when VP8 was released, no such patent lawsuit has occured.

Also, On2 which Google purchased holds lots of video compression patents, patents which codec's like h.264 and h.265 just as likely violates.

MPEG-LA does not offer any patent indemnification either.

Re: VP8 vs H.264 – Which One is Better?

#34

Post by Hupo »

nullc wrote: post #23
Hupo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>not very representative clip I chose the clip based on what Dark_Shikari (x264 developer) had to say about it[1]: It shouldn't bias too heavily towards any one encoder like many of the other standard test clips will: a. It's relatively high motion, so it won't bias heavily against encoders without B-frames or qpel (as, say, mobcal does). b. It's not so high motion that it would cripple video formats that don't suppo…

Because of texture this clip benefits enormously from 8x8 transforms (as well as substantially from an activity masking aware encoder). On an intra frame in prior testing Theora did enormously better than VP8 on this clip for these reasons. If your test was to compare an intraframe between vp8 / baseline h264 / and Theora, you would have concluded Theora was the best by a wide margin. But this would be an erroneous c…

>If your test was to compare an intraframe between vp8 / baseline h264 / and Theora, you would have concluded Theora was the best by a wide margin.

But it wasn't. I was comparing the visual quality of the whole video, and provided the full encoded clips for people to download and compare for that reason.

I am willing to do further test encodes, but have no interest in doing something like encoding all 28 HD test clips available on derf's test clip page[1], since as a purely visual comparison, especially with the actual encodes, it would be incredibly exhausting.

EDIT: I added a notice about the downsides of single clip comparison to the top of the post.

[1] http://media.xiph.org/video/derf/

Re: VP8 vs H.264 – Which One is Better?

#35

Post by nitrogen »

taligent wrote: post #31
shmerl wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By closed I mean not available for free use and distribution, for example in open source projects which can't pay any royalties. May be saying free format would sound more clear, since you are right, closed is a bit ambiguous, as it can also mean a format without published specification which needs to be reverse engineered to be used. Also, I don't think that H.264 forbids only commercial use. Can you freely distribu…

Open source projects can't pay royalties. But people who use them can be forced to. The idea that VP8/VP9 will gain traction and remain royalty free is laughable.

You keep bashing anything not h.26x in multiple threads. MPEG-LA threatened to assemble an anti-VP8 patent pool ages ago, and that has yet to materialize. Show us the goods, and give a really darn good reason why the ideals behind wanting a royalty-free codec don't matter.

Re: VP8 vs H.264 – Which One is Better?

#36

Post by shmerl »

taligent wrote: post #31
shmerl wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By closed I mean not available for free use and distribution, for example in open source projects which can't pay any royalties. May be saying free format would sound more clear, since you are right, closed is a bit ambiguous, as it can also mean a format without published specification which needs to be reverse engineered to be used. Also, I don't think that H.264 forbids only commercial use. Can you freely distribu…

Open source projects can't pay royalties. But people who use them can be forced to. The idea that VP8/VP9 will gain traction and remain royalty free is laughable.

> Open source projects can't pay royalties. But people who use them can be forced to.

That's right, and that's the reason to avoid any closed codecs.

> The idea that VP8/VP9 will gain traction and remain royalty free is laughable.

What's laughable? VP8 remains royalty free. VP9 will as well. In practice you can never guarantee that some submarine patent troll won't appear tomorrow to threaten you. But the same perfectly applies to H.264/H.265 so your argument is irrelevant, since such threat applies to virtually anything, but it doesn't mean one should stop innovating because of it.

Re: VP8 vs H.264 – Which One is Better?

#37

Post by gillianseed »

Scaevolus wrote: post #4

DarkShikari (x264 dev) has blogged about VP8 a few times: http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/category/vp8 "The first in-depth technical analysis of VP8" http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377

There's no doubting gasset-glaser's (DarkShikari) knowledge in these matters, but he is hardly an objective party.

Apart from being one of the developers of open source GPL licenced x264 encoder, he and the other developers are also licencing it for proprietary use (nothing wrong with that, I think it's a great way of making money out of open source development). This means that a open source royalty free codec like VP8 (and later VP9) could cut into their revenue stream.

I'm not saying that this affected the outcome of his test, but it's still context. Also his test back then was also criticized for only using one clip, here's another test with a larger set of comparisons:

http://qpsnr.youlink.org/vp8_x264/VP8_vs_x264.html

I can't vouch for the validity of this anymore than the validity of any other test.

Re: VP8 vs H.264 – Which One is Better?

#38

Post by sillysaurus »

Hupo wrote: post #34
nullc wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because of texture this clip benefits enormously from 8x8 transforms (as well as substantially from an activity masking aware encoder). On an intra frame in prior testing Theora did enormously better than VP8 on this clip for these reasons. If your test was to compare an intraframe between vp8 / baseline h264 / and Theora, you would have concluded Theora was the best by a wide margin. But this would be an erroneous c…

>If your test was to compare an intraframe between vp8 / baseline h264 / and Theora, you would have concluded Theora was the best by a wide margin. But it wasn't. I was comparing the visual quality of the whole video, and provided the full encoded clips for people to download and compare for that reason. I am willing to do further test encodes, but have no interest in doing something like encoding all 28 HD test clip…

I have no interest in doing something like encoding all 28 HD test clips, since as a purely visual comparison, it would be incredibly exhausting.

Science is exhausting. If you're not working hard, then you're likely to miss the interesting (counter-intuitive) results. In fact, finding counter-intuitive results is the whole point of science. If the truth were intuitive, explanations wouldn't need testing.

Re: VP8 vs H.264 – Which One is Better?

#39

Post by ck2 »

taligent wrote: post #28
ck2 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does your standalone device have vp8? All bluray devices can play h264 streams but almost never vp8. Of course as everything switches to android this will change completely by the end of the decade, but for streaming in 2013, h264 is the better investment. Once they move to h265 vs vp9 the point is moot but that won't be common for at least five years. The encoding requirements for those streams will also be signific…

> Of course as everything switches to android this will change completely by the end of the decade That's hilarious.

You disagree that a free, solid OS like android with a commercial marketplace like the google play store will become ubiquitous?

I mean we are reaching the point where a $20 device can just plug right into a hdmi port and you have a full blown pc with standardized wifi and bluetooth support. By 2018 they will be $10 and sold at gas stations.

When that happens you can have any codec upgrade you want as long as it can still decode on that hardware spec in realtime.

Re: VP8 vs H.264 – Which One is Better?

#40

Post by gillianseed »

sounds wrote: post #20
Hupo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That he has. My test clip choice was inspired by him[1], and I also link to another blog post of his[2] in the conclusion. That VP8 blog post is almost three years old now, though, and the comment I'm replying to in my article claimed that VP8 is better than H.264 "at this point". This is why I did my test with the latest and greatest encoders available for both formats today. [1] http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.ph…

I think it would be interesting to do a follow-up comparison h264 vs VP8 for mobile. 1080p vbr targetting ~7 Mbps, 480p vbr targetting ~2.5 Mbps, etc. It's important to explore the space a bit for discussion's sake.

I think it would be more interesting to compare VP9 with HEVC (h.265), I know the VP9 experimental branch can easily be checked out and tested, but I don't know of where to find HEVC encoders (although I'm sure they exist with some Google fu).

Obviously there are problems with testing unfinished implementations, as:

A) they are generally VERY slow given that there's little optimization during the development phase, and these next gen video codecs are more demanding than the previous generation

B) a great deal of the quality comes from fine-tuning during implementation, not from the specification. For example x264 is a 'best-in-class' implementation of h.264, readily beating many other implementations of the very same specification.

As such, this fine-tuning is not likely to exist until the codec implementations mature, which likely means that what is available now of HEVC/VP9 serves only as very rough estimates.

Would still interesting though :)

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