State of HEVC Bit Rates in 2014 - Comparing HEVC, H.264 and MPEG-2

This paper presents the results of empirical testing of HEVC for SD, HD and Ultra HD, including data from hundreds of test encodes across a variety of bit rates. The paper then compares HEVC quality results with the quality achieved by common MPEG-2 and H.264 distribution profiles, to determine HEVC bit rate recommendations for SD, HD and Ultra HD distribution. — The paper presents the following recommended bit rates for HEVC encoding: SD at 860Kb/sec., HD at 2703Kb/sec., and Ultra HD at 23922Kb/sec. These represent a 45% bit rate savings compared to H.264. — HEVC encoding was done using x265 version 1.2, and all quality measurements were done using PSNR and SSIM. The paper uses HEVC Main profile (8-bit) to allow quality matching with H.264 and MPEG-2 8-bit encoding.

Published

2014-10

Content type

Original Research

Keywords

HEVC, MPEG-2, H.264, Bit Rates, Encoding, Comparing HEVC, x265

DOI

10.5594/M001541

ISBN

978-1-61482-954-6