Video network traffic and quality comparison of VP8 and H.264 SVC

Abstract

Google has recently released the video compression format VP8 to the open source community. This new compression format competes against the existing H.264 video standard developed by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) in collaboration with the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). This paper compares these two video coding standards in terms of video bit rate-distortion (quality) performance and the video network traffic variability with different long video sequences. We find that VP8 presently does not fulfill its promise to achieve twice the quality at half the bandwidth compared to H.264. The rate-distortion (RD) performance of VP8 is rather slightly below the RD performance of H.264. On the positive side, in contrast to H.264, VP8 has no license fees.