Netflix Doing Live Webcast Tomorrow Showcasing Their Results Comparing H.264/H.265/VP9

[Archived webcast is here, the Netflix talk starts at 1:00:43]

No one has more experience encoding video for on-demand delivery than Netflix. The company is always working to improve their video compression efficiency to deliver the best video quality possible, with as few bits as possible. And over the past few weeks, the company has been comparing the quality difference between encoding video utilizing H.264, H.265 and VP9. Netflix ran a large-scale comparison to see if the 50% bandwidth improvement over H.264 was applicable to their use case.

Netflix said they, “sampled 5000 12-second clips from our catalog, covering a wide range of genres and signal characteristics. With 3 codecs, 2 configurations, 3 resolutions (480p, 720p and 1080p) and 8 quality levels per configuration-resolution pair, we generated more than 200 million encoded frames. We applied six quality metrics – PSNR, PSNRMSE, SSIM, MS-SSIM, VIF and VMAF – resulting in more than half a million bitrate-quality curves.”

Netflix will present their methodology and results tomorrow, during a live webcast from the SPIE Applications of Digital Image Processing conference, at 11am ET. The link is not yet available, but Netflix’s Anne Aaron will publish the link to Twitter when it’s live.