A comparative study of the AV1, HEVC, and VVC video codecs
Mukul V. Shirvaikar, Christos Grecos · 2025
Video compression technologies have been evolving for several years with the aim of providing high-quality video with minimum bandwidth consumption. The rise of streaming services and the need for high-quality video has led to the development of video codecs such as AV1, HEVC and VVC. In this research paper, we compare these codecs by examining their performance, encoding complexity, licensing, and adoption rate. We will provide a short description of the salient features of each codec followed by performance analysis with the help of reference studies that review the benchmarking of these three state-of-the-art coding standards The benchmarking is done for a variety of application scenarios and considers the effects of a variety of coding parameters, mainly on the complexity and rate distortion (RD) performance of these coding standards. Our findings suggest that while AV1 offers slightly better compression efficiency, it has a much higher computational complexity than HEVC. The AV1 and VVC reference encoders required averaged run times relative to the HEVC reference encoder by a factor of more than three for AV1 and more than nine for VVC. On the other hand, the decoding run times indicated that the decoder complexity is manageable for both AV1 and VVC coding standards, with an averaged decoding run time relative to that of the HEVC reference decoder of about 66% for AV1 and 182% for VVC, respectively. Overall, AV1 has a slightly better RD performance over HEVC on the test content, and both AV1 and HEVC perform significantly worse than the VVC standard. Interestingly, the results showed the complexity is higher for HD rather than UHD resolutions. The AV1 reference encoder has approximately 10 times the complexity of HEVC, whereas the VVC reference encoder has approximately 6.5 times the complexity of HEVC. These findings can be significant for applications requiring real time ultra-high-definition video compression.