Thread: H.265 Video Compression: a new standard?

H.264 is one the most common formats for recording, compressing, and distributing high-definition video. YouTube and Vimeo support this format and it runs natively in both Lightroom 4 and Adobe Premiere Pro CS6.

Word on the streets is that the The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and the Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) are teaming up and plan to release H.264’s successor as early as January 2013 -- H.265 or MPEG-H Part 2.

The question ishow much more efficient will H.265 be?

Supposedly it will have almost twice the amount of compression ratio from for a similar quality level as H.264.

This means that less memory cards, and less external hard drives.

Below is the only video test comparing H.264 and H.265 performed on an Android tablet by Qualcomm, a San Diego-based chip-maker that is listed as a member of the international standards group developing H.265.



The H.265 sounds good in theory, but there is another codec called VP8 coming out from NVIDIA.

Time will tell which will be adopted as the new standard. Do you think H.265 will be the new king of video compression? Please post comments and feedback below as I would like to learn more as well. Thanks.

Best,

Justin Katz
Digital Media Associate
Eduardo Angel LLC: Consulting, Education, Visuals and Blog.

You can't really tell anything from that clip. Although if you pause the video at certain points the H.265 had some ghosting on the camera movement, it almost looked like the footage was shot at a lower frame rate to the H.264 footage but I presume it's the same raw footage. BUT like I said it's hard to tell from the clip. If it can perform as good as H.264 with around half the file size, I guess it will be popular.

Interesting to see how it pans out

Give me more quality for reduced file size please!

H.265 is actually a highly tweaked variant of H.264 with a few modifications and VP8 is the basis of Google's WebM, which has been around for a while and not seen a high uptake. I would not expect either to displace H.264 soon, but maybe over time, especially given that most of H.265 has already been implemented in H.264, I think we could see it in software. Hardware is another matter, since validation takes so much longer and is so much more expensive.

As a comparison JPEG-2000 is in many ways superior to JPEG but JPEG persists. And MNG is superior to GIF but GIF also endures.

I don't think this example video tells us very much except that the bit rates are lower for a generally higher PSNR (subjective quality), but I for one trust that if MPEG standardise it, it will be better than H.264. What will people do with the extra bits ? I think many people will still struggle to choose good coding parameters; and others might opt to keep the quality high - for example, as in Superbit DVDs.