H.264/MPEG-AVC, H.265/MPEG-HEVC and VP9 codec comparison for live gaming video streaming
Nabajeet Barman, Maria G. Martini · 2017
Gaming videos are increasingly being streamed live over the Internet, as evident by the increasing popularity of services such as Twitch.tv and YouTube-Gaming, with Twitch.tv alone consisting of approx. two million streamers and over nine million daily active users. We present here an objective evaluation of eight most popular games encoded using H.264/MPEG-AVC, H.265/MPEG-HEVC and VP9 encoders for live game video streaming applications as currently used by Twitch.tv and YouTube-Gaming. The results are reported in terms of three objective video quality metrics (PSNR, SSIM, VIFp), Bjontegaard-Delta Bitrate (BD-BR) analysis, and encoding duration. For the encoding settings and the encoders used, in terms of BD-BR analysis, H.265/MPEG-HEVC is found to provide the best compression efficiency but is 2.6 times slower than H.264/MPEG-AVC. The magnitude of bitrate savings for VP9 compared to H.264/MPEG-AVC is found to be highly dependent on the content type, with H.264/MPEG-AVC resulting in higher average bitrate savings with an encoding speed four times faster than VP9.