Comparison Between H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, VP9 and Daala

H.264/AVC

H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10 or AVC (Advanced Video Coding) is a video compression format, and is currently one of the most commonly used formats for the recording, compression, and distribution of video content. The final drafting work on the first version of the standard was completed in May 2003. It has been widely adopted.

H.265/HEVC

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) or H.265 is the current joint video coding standardization project of ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (ITU-T Q.6/SG 16) and ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 11). It is an evolution of current industrial H.264/AVC standard and was developed to increase AVC compression efficiency by two times and endorse the development of UHD systems. HEVC is expected to replace AVC in newly developed video systems.

VP9

VP9 is an open video compression standard being developed by Google. It basically shares common features with AVC coding like VP8 did.

Daala

Daala is the current working name of a video codec under development by the Xiph.Org Foundation. Daala is intended to be a high-efficiency codec for use cases similar to those of High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC or H.265) and VP9. Daala is using a lapped transform to reduce the blocking artifacts characteristic of other video codecs that use the discrete cosine transform directly.

Comparison

	H.264/AVC	H.265/HEVC	VP9	Daala
Estimated Current Compression Efficiency for General Video	50:1	100:1	60:1	30:1
Complexity	High	Very High	Medium	Medium
Current Performance	Fast	Slow	Fast	N/A
Royalty	Almost free now	Some	Free	Free
Transform Coding	DCT/ Hadamard	DCT/DST	DCT/DST	Lapped (linear discrete block)
Prediction Coding	8 Modes for intra predictions	33 Directional modes for intra predictions + planar and DC intra prediction modes	10 Modes for intra predictions	Frequency domain predictor
Entropy Coding	Context-adaptive binary arithmetic coding, Context-adaptive variable-length coding (CABAC), VLC	Context-adaptive binary arithmetic coding (CABAC)	Arithmetic bool coder with largish probability range
Block Size	16x16	Up to 64x64	32x32
Max Resolution Support	4,096×2,304	8,192×4,320
Bits	8-14	8-12	8
Implemented Color Spaces	YUV 4:2:0 -4:4:4	YUV, RGB, YCbCr	YUV 4:2:0	YUV