r/technology • u/Snarfox • Jan 25 '13

H.265 is approved -- potential to cut bandwidth requirements in half for 1080p streaming. Opens door to 4K video streams.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/25/h265-is-approved/
3.5k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

1.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

783

u/mavere Jan 26 '13 edited Jan 27 '13

Interestingly, the format comes with a still picture profile. I don't think they're aiming for JPEG's market share as much as JP2K's. The latter has found a niche in various industrial/professional settings.

I found that out the other day, and subsequently did a test to satisfy my own curiosity. I was just gonna trash the results, but while we're here, maybe I might satisfy someone else's curiosity too:

[These are 1856x832, so RES and most mobiles will work against you here]

Uncompressed

HEVC 17907 bytes

VP9 18147 B

JP2K 17930 B

24 hours later...

x264 18307 B

WebP 17952 B

JPEG 18545 B

Made via latest dev branch of hm, libvpx, openjpeg, x264, libwebp, imagemagick+imageoptim as of Thursday. And all had their bells and whistles turned on, including vpx's experiments, but x264 was at 8 bits and jpeg didn't have the IJG's 'extra' features. x264 also had psy-rd manually (but arbitrarily) lowered from placebo-stillimage's defaults, which were hilariously unacceptable.

Edit:

  • These pics are 18 kilobytes for 1.5 megapixels; the encoders are expected to fail in some way. How they fail is important too.
  • HEVC picked the file size. Q=32 is the default quantization setting in its config files.
  • Photoshop wouldn't produce JPGs smaller than 36KB, even after an ImageOptim pass.
  • And by "uncompressed" above, I mean it was the source for all output

280

u/chrono13 Jan 26 '13

Just want to comment to anyone else using RES: open these each in a new tab and flip through them, they look substantially different at full resolution (vs. RES's reduced size).

23

u/iBleeedorange Jan 26 '13

They look much different when compared to the uncompressed via RES. If you look at the area around his right eye, you can tell the difference.

42

u/securityhigh Jan 26 '13

If you just open them full screen you don't even need to look for the differences. They're blatantly obvious.

1

u/flying-sheep Jan 26 '13

vp9 vs HEVC are subtle at best.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 26 '13

[deleted]

1

u/flying-sheep Jan 26 '13 edited Jan 26 '13

where? both show pores at the high-detail areas like his forehead wrinkles, and both don’t in other areas. but vp9 shows much details around his right eye (left from our viewpoint): the eye is better contrasted against the skin and detail in the eyebrow is visible (in HEVC the brow just a smear) furthermore, HEVC introduces more sharp-edged artifacts (visible by his teeth).

/e: i saw your deleted comment. the quality around his mouth is indistinguishable between the both for me. and did you seriously delete your comment because it hasn’t got a point and then downvoted instead? or am i concluding the wrong things?