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AbstractGaming videos are increasingly being streamed live reduction compared to its predecessor H.264/MPEG-AVC
over the Internet, as evident by the increasing popularity of (based on the test conditions and video sequences used by
services such as Twitch.tv and YouTube-Gaming, with Twitch.tv the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC)) [1],
alone consisting of approx. two million streamers and over nine
million daily active users. We present here an objective evalua- [2]. H.265/MPEG-HEVC, standardized in 2013, is the newest
tion of eight most popular games encoded using H.264/MPEG- video compression standard developed by the JCT-VC. The
AVC, H.265/MPEG-HEVC and VP9 encoders for live game increased compression by H.265/MPEG-HEVC is achieved at
video streaming applications as currently used by Twitch.tv and the cost of increased computational complexity. Its predeces-
YouTube-Gaming. The results are reported in terms of three ob- sor, H.264/MPEG-AVC, jointly developed by ITU-T Video
jective video quality metrics (PSNR, SSIM, VIFp), Bjontegaard-
Delta Bitrate (BD-BR) analysis, and encoding duration. For Coding Experts Group and ISO/IEC JTC1 Moving Picture
the encoding settings and the encoders used, in terms of BD- Experts Group (MPEG) and standardized in 2003, is one of the
BR analysis, H.265/MPEG-HEVC is found to provide the best most widely used video codec in many applications including
compression efciency but is 2.6 times slower than H.264/MPEG- real-time services such as Twitch.tv. As a successor to the
AVC. The magnitude of bitrate savings for VP9 compared to earlier VP8 standard and competitor of H.265/HEVC, Google
H.264/MPEG-AVC is found to be highly dependent on the content
type, with H.264/MPEG-AVC resulting in higher average bitrate released an open and royalty free video codec called VP9 [3].
savings with an encoding speed four times faster than VP9. VP9 video in WebM container is currently used in YouTube
Index TermsGaming Videos, Video Encoding, H.264/MPEG- and supported on most browsers. In the rest of this paper, we
AVC, H.265/MPEG-HEVC, VP9, Quality of Experience (QoE), interchangeably use H.264 or AVC to refer to H.264/MPEG-
Video Streaming AVC and H.265 or HEVC to refer to H.265/MPEG-HEVC.
I. I NTRODUCTION In the eld of gaming, while much effort has been put into
design and optimization of games, cloud gaming platforms,
The latest Cisco Visual Networking Index Forecast predicts
etc., very few studies have focused on streaming of gaming
that by 2020 the global IP video trafc will be 82% of the net
videos. The importance of optimization of gaming videos
Internet trafc [1]. With the improvement of existing network
streaming is evident from the fact that Twitch.tv is currently
infrastructure there has been considerable improvement in the
ranked 4th in terms of total trafc during peak hours in the
available bandwidth to the end user. This is set to increase
U.S.A. [4]. The increased demand for such OTT services
further with upcoming technologies such as 5G. On the other
leading to increased bandwidth consumption calls for more
hand, the demand of multimedia services and user expectations
efcient encoders. Gaming videos, unlike traditional streaming
are also increasing. Recently there has been the rise of multiple
videos, consist of synthetic and articial content and may have
Over The Top (OTT) players providing contents in newer
very high spatial and temporal complexity (depending on the
video formats such as Ultra High Denition (UHD), High
genre), with some scenes of very high motion content followed
Dynamic Range (HDR) and newer services such as gaming
by scenes with very low motion content. Also, they need to
video streaming, virtual reality applications, etc. This has led
be encoded and streamed in real-time. To this end, we present
to an increased demand for higher bandwidth resulting in
a video codec comparison of the three most popular codecs,
more challenges for the already resource constrained network
taking into consideration the following factors:
operators.
One of the solutions to reduce this increasing demand for 1) The study is performed using gaming videos of some of
bandwidth is by achieving higher compression efciency dur- the most popular games streamed on Twitch.tv, one of
ing the source encoding process without loss of visual quality, the most famous and widely used platform for live and
thus preserving the end user Quality of Experience (QoE). on-demand gaming video streaming.
Efforts in this direction resulted in the H.265/MPEG-HEVC 2) FFmpeg and its open source codec implementations for
codec which for the same quality achieves almost 50% bitrate the three codec standards are used to encode the videos to
QoMEX2017 Erfurt, Germany; 978-1-5386-4024-1/17/$31.00 2017
c IEEE make the results reproducible in an easy and cost effective
manner. than both H.264 and H.265 in terms of coding efciency. In
3) Real-time encoding settings for live streaming of the [13], they performed a comparison study of the three codecs
games as recommended by Twitch.tv and FFmpeg are using a low delay conguration. In terms of compression
used [5], [6]. efciency, the performance of H.265 was found superior to
The main objective of this work is to study the performance VP9 and H.264. In terms of encoding duration, VP9 was found
of the three most widely used codecs for applications which faster than H.265 but much slower than H.264. Since the work
include real-time encoding and transmission of gaming videos in [13] was limited to objective evaluation, the authors in [14]
such as Twitch.tv. Earlier performance studies of the three performed a subjective evaluation of HEVC and VP9 assuming
encoders have mostly focused on non real-time applications real-time applications using a low-delay conguration of the
such as Video-on-demand (VOD) and TV Broadcast scenarios. HM reference software. HEVC was found to be superior to
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II VP9 and AVC.
describes similar works involving codec comparison. Sec- Most of the works discussed above were limited to non
tion III describes the source videos, encoder settings and real-time applications such as VOD streaming with no con-
encoding parameters used in this work. Results are discussed straint on the total encoding duration. Such studies, while
in Section III-B1 and Section III-D5 nally concludes the indicative of the compression efciency of the encoder for
paper. VOD scenarios, did not provide information on the relative
performance of the three codecs for real-time scenarios. The
II. R ELATED W ORK adopted encoding settings, such as high encoding times (e.g.,
The authors of [7] performed a large scale analysis of placebo preset which focus on maximizing the encoded video
x264, x265 and libvpx encoders for VOD application scenarios quality without any time constraint), 3-pass/2-pass VBR, etc.,
for Standard Denition (SD), High Denition (HD) and Full are not necessarily valid for live streaming applications. Few of
HD (FHD) resolutions. The videos were encoded content these works ( [13], [14]) evaluate the relative performance of
adaptively using three-pass setting (video was encoded at eight the three codecs using low-delay conguration of the reference
different quality levels and then the encoded bitrates were used software. While the low-delay conguration emulates real-
for 2-pass Variable Bit Rate (VBR) encoding). Since there are time encoding, the encoder as such cannot be used for real-
no encoding time constraints, a placebo preset was used which time streaming applications (reference software are as such
lets the encoder achieve the best compression performance. being developed to provide complete features and produce
Results are reported in terms of four objective metrics and compliant bit-streams and not necessarily to optimize the
BD-rate results with x265, on an average, providing the best encoding process which is left as an open question for the
compression efciency compared to libvpx and x264. developers). Also, as discussed in [7], both of these works
In [8], the authors provide an objective and subjective as- ( [13], [14]) use a mix of reference software and practical
sessment to measure the coding efciency of the three codecs encoders, which makes it unclear whether the assessment
using the reference encoders but limited to UHD resolution was of the compression efciency achievable by the bit-
and TV broadcast scenarios. HEVC was found to perform stream syntax or on what can be achieved by the codec
better than AVC and VP9. When compared subjectively, AVC implementations. In contrast, in this work we do not perform
performed better than VP9 while objectively VP9 performance an assessment of the coding standards, but an evaluation
was better than AVC. of the performance of currently available practical encoders
In [9], the authors performed a codec comparison of the for H.264/MPEG-AVC, H.265/MPEG-HEVC and VP9 under
three encoders based on video content complexity for FHD real-time constraints such as fast encoding (veryfast preset,
resolution videos. It was observed that with increase in video realtime deadline), strict Constant Bitrate (CBR) settings as
content complexity the objective quality decreases, while the used currently by live gaming videos streaming applications
encoding time increases. Among the three codecs, X.265 was such as Twitch.tv.
found to be superior to X.264 and VP9.
III. E VALUATION M ETHODOLOGY
The authors in [10] performed a codec comparison for
H.264, H.265, VP8 and VP9 for UHD, FHD and HD reso- A. Reference Videos
lutions and reported the results in terms of three full reference Fig. 1 presents the screenshots of the gaming videos used
objective quality metrics (PSNR, SSIM and VQM) and BD- in this work. The gaming videos used consist of some of the
rate analysis. H.265/MPEG-HEVC and VP9 performance was most popular games, namely Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
found to be almost equal with both performing better than (CSGO), Diablo, DOTA2, FIFA 2016 (FIFA16), Hearthstone-
the earlier encoders. VP8 was found to be superior to the Heroes of Warcraft (Hearthstone), League of Legends (LOL),
H.264/MPEG-AVC standard. Need for Speed (NFS16) and World of Warcraft (WoW). The
In 2013, Grois et. al. did a performance comparison of games were played locally on a high end gaming desktop PC
H.264, H.265 and VP9 [11] and more recently a coding and were captured losslessly in RGB format at 1920x1080
efciency comparison of H.264, H.265 and AV1/VP9 encoders resolution. The gaming videos cover a wide range of genres
[12]. In both works, H.265 was found to be superior to H.264 such as strategy, role play, racing etc. and are of 10 seconds
and VP9 (AV1/VP9) with VP9 (AV1/VP9) performing worse duration each, with frame rate of 24 fps.
(a) Counter Strike (b) Diablo (c) Dota2 (d) FIFA16
(e) Hearthstone (f) League of Legends (g) Need for Speed (h) World of Warcraft
90
CSGO
and Temporal Information (TI) which dene the amount of LoL Hearthstone
80
spatial details and the amount of temporal changes in a video Dota2
sequence respectively. ITU-T Recommendation P.910 denes 70
Diablo
WoW
the SI value for a video sequence as the maximum value of NFS
individual SI values obtained for each frame (only luminance 60
32 27
PSNR (dB)
PSNR (dB)
PSNR (dB)
PSNR (dB)
30 28
x264
30 26.5 x265
vp9
28 27
28 26
26 26 26 25.5
1000 2000 3000 4000 1000 1500 2000 2500 400 600 800 1000 1200 300 400 500 600 700 800
Bitrate (kbps) Bitrate (kbps) Bitrate (kbps) Bitrate (kbps)
1 0.985 0.975 0.97
SSIM
SSIM
SSIM
0.98 0.975 0.965 0.96
0.65 0.5
0.6
VIFp
VIFp
VIFp
VIFp
0.6 0.5 0.48
0.5
0.55 0.46
Fig. 3: Objective Quality vs. Bitrate for three codecs for one of the sample videos (CSGO).
can benet from more optimized (e.g. 3-pass/2-pass) and The BD-BR savings for vp9 compared to x264 at the cost
longer encoding durations (e.g. slow/placebo preset), live of increased encoding duration makes vp9 less attractive for
streaming scenarios have more constraints and hence have live gaming video streaming applications. In contrast, the BD-
stricter and limited set of encoding choices (e.g. super- BR savings for x265 compared to that of x264 is almost
fast/ultrafast preset settings, 1 pass, constant bitrate). As 20% but at the cost of increased encoding duration. Such
observed in previous studies for VOD streaming scenarios high encoding duration raises questions about the applicability
such as in [7], also for live streaming scenarios, in terms of of such encoders for applications such as live gaming video
bitrate gains at xed quality, H.265/MPEG-HEVC outperforms streaming where increased delays may result in huge broadcast
H.264/MPEG-AVC and VP9. Also, for the settings and en- latency issues resulting in decreased end user QoE [22]. While
coders used in this work, H.264/MPEG-AVC on an average the present H.265/MPEG-HEVC practical encoders can still
offers superior performance gains compared to VP9. be used for obtaining different representations at different bit-
The encoding duration for the three encoders was analyzed. rates for on-demand streaming, for real-time encoding and
While during real live streaming applications the actual streaming applications such as gaming videos streaming, there
encoding duration may vary with respect to the one obtained is a need for development of faster and more optimized
with our simulation, we believe that the orders of magnitude practical encoders.
of the average encoding duration are still well representing Based on the review of existing works and results
the actual duration. With respect to encoding duration, the obtained from this work, we conclude that, in gen-
x264 encoder was found to be the fastest and vp9 the slowest. eral, the actual performance of the video codecs is
TABLE IV: Encoding Run Times (in seconds) for 1080p resolution videos.
x264 x265 vp9
Sequence/
1000 1500 2000 3000 4000 1000 1500 2000 3000 4000 1000 1500 2000 3000 4000
Bitrate (kbps)
CSGO 2.65 2.75 2.83 2.96 3.04 8.43 9.09 9.59 10.92 11.47 12.72 14.39 15.51 17.09 18.47
Diablo 3.05 3.05 3.20 3.36 3.33 6.95 7.60 7.18 8.82 9.46 9.85 10.48 11.38 12.64 13.34
DOTA2 4.09 4.14 4.19 4.11 4.37 6.12 6.53 6.68 7.50 7.87 9.22 10.19 10.79 11.41 12.21
FIFA16 2.90 3.03 3.18 3.32 3.09 5.76 6.26 6.42 7.20 7.98 10.49 10.99 11.43 11.63 12.35
Hearthstone 2.86 2.88 2.95 2.72 2.91 5.23 5.10 5.73 5.8 6.05 6.97 8.02 7.97 8.83 9.21
LOL 1.79 1.84 1.89 1.91 1.93 5.15 5.25 5.63 6.11 6.38 8.41 8.96 9.09 9.69 9.97
NFS 2.74 2.86 2.90 3.04 3.16 9.07 10.37 10.83 11.99 12.63 11.06 12.67 13.48 15.34 16.85
WoW 1.94 2.05 2.14 2.15 2.24 5.72 5.92 6.24 6.49 6.96 9.83 10.48 10.83 11.60 11.71
Average 2.75 2.82 2.91 2.95 3.01 6.56 7.02 7.29 8.10 8.60 9.82 10.77 11.31 12.28 13.02
Total Average 2.89 7.51 11.44
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