MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and Windows Media Video Codec Comparisons Using MSE Analysis

Digital video faces the intrinsic problem of huge files sizes, which puts a strain on the available bandwidth in a communication system. Correspondingly, the video files need to be compressed in some manner before transmission. The inherent properties of lossy encoding algorithms can cause artifacts in the decompressed video sequences. In this paper, the effects of encoding and decoding using three different video formats (MPEG1, MPEG2 and Windows Media Video) has been analyzed at different frame rates (15fps and 30fps), frame sizes (320×240 and 640×480) and bit rates (48k, 100k and 300k). These parameters were selected by observing that they are the most commonly used for viewing video transferred over the Internet. In order to analyze the performance of codecs over a broad range of video content, sequences of 30 seconds in length were selected from various sources including movie clippings, television footage and generic video material, depending upon the range of motion of the objects in the video. The four video sequences chosen are from sources that are described as follows: animation, still frames, “talking head”, and a slide presentation. The measurement metric used by this paper, MSE (Mean Square Error), gives the cumulative mean square error of each frame's color components, averaged for the entire video sequence. The determination of how much each codec alters the frame is the goal of this paper, which will aid in the selection of the appropriate codec for a particular application.

Published

2004-02

Content type

Original Research

DOI

10.5594/M001015

ISBN

978-1-60423-807-5