Performance analysis of H.264, H.265, VP9 and AV1 video encoders

Videos can portray our thinking in a better way than anything can. As a result, online as well as offline videos in entertainment, health, storytelling, education and in surveillance are increasing day by day which further initiates video coding research to decrease the size while keeping satisfactory quality. Due to the ubiquitous necessity of video encoding, a fully functional, high performance and with easy licensing codec have been sought from industry and academia for a long time. In this paper, we investigate the performance of the software encoders of H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, VP9 and the new royalty free encoder AV1 from AOMedia for relatively small video files. To ensure fair analysis, we performed extensive experiments by varying different parameters. With default parameters, for the same video bitrates, AV1 obtains better quality as compared to other encodings. However, when we use the slowest time preset 'placebo' for H.264 and H.265, AV1 goes slightly behind H.265. Among the other two, VP9 always outperforms H.264. For all schemes, as quality increases, the encoding time also increase.