A comparative study of HEVC, VVC, VP9, AV1 and AVS3 video codecs

Abstract

Video codec is the core engine which has been driving various video related applications for the past several decades, such as online video streaming and video conferencing. Driven by the drastic growth of global video traffic and improved computation power of various devices, the evolution of video compression technology has delivered several generations of video coding standards. In this paper, the technologies used in recent video codecs are described and their coding performance are compared, including HEVC and VVC developed by the ISO/IEC MPEG and ITU-T VCEG, VP9 developed by Google, AV1 developed by AOM and AVS3 (IEEE 1857) developed by Audio Video coding Standard workgroup of China. The datasets cover a wide range of typically used video resolutions up to 4K. The experiments are performed by collecting four data points for each test sequence, and the coding efficiency is measured by the popular BD-Rate metrics.