A Comparison Between XVC, AV1, and HEVC video CODECs: Minimizing Network Traffic While Maintaining Quality

Volume 5 Issue 3 July - September 2018

Research Paper

A Comparison Between XVC, AV1, and HEVC video CODECs: Minimizing Network Traffic While Maintaining Quality

Jonathan Adolfsson*, Fredrik Hyyrynen**

*Electrical Engineer, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, University in Stockholm, Sweden

**Computer Scientist, KTH Royal Institute of Technology University in Stockholm, Sweden

Adolfsson , J., and Hyyrynen, F., (2018). A Comparison Between Xvc, Av1, And Hevc Video Codecs: Minimizing Network Traffic While Maintaining Quality. i-manager’s Journal on Image Processing, 5(3), 1-13. https://doi.org/10.26634/jip.5.3.15265

Abstract

IP video traffic on the network continues to grow. To account for a future traffic of a million minutes of videos per second, it is important to minimize the traffic each video generates. This is a performance comparison of the HEVC, AV1, and xvc (in fast mode) video CODECs with the focus on minimizing network traffic for common use cases, such as video conferences and social media video streaming, these being used, where less than optimal videos are sent. The purpose is to identify which CODEC gives the best quality at the lowest bit rate. This is done by running a test bench with multiple videos of different qualities, encoding and decoding each video with each CODEC. The study shows that xvc (fast mode) and AV1 (double-pass) has similar quality performance on the dataset and has a noticeable improvement compared to HEVC (double-pass) when it comes to less optimal video quality. This research work was conducted in the context of the course II2202 Research Methodology and Scientific Writing at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden.