There is a difference between the two most common HEVC and VP9 Codecs. Both of these are for video streaming however each has its own advantages. The VP9 codec is currently used by places such as Youtube as it is very efficient. These are the advantages and disadvantages of the two codecs. See when we look at both codecs here. You can also find the vp9 codec download on here and the HEVC media extensions.
HEVC and VP9 Codecs
The HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) and VP9 are two popular video compression standards. These are newer standards which have come to market. Most of these codecs tends to be used for streaming video and compressing this video stream to save bandwidth. Much like others there is also the issue of CPU power used when doing this. There is a difference between the two not only in compression but also in CPU power needed. The later is important if you are doing this out of a datacenter where power can become an issue.
HEVC Codec
This codec we also covered under the HEIF and HEVC media extensions article. As we know the HEVC is known for its high compression efficiency. As stated this is to ensure a quality video with a low bitrate to save bandwidth. The compression for this standard is complete with the intra prediction, inter prediction, and transform coding technique. This uses more power to complete the compression and decompression on the computers.
- 1080p video at 30 frames per second requires approximately 20-30 GFLOPS for HEVC encoding.
VP9 Codec
The VP9 codec is an opensource codec. This is the upgrade from the Google VP8 codec. Much like the HEVC codec it also makes use of its own compression method. This codec makes use of improved inter-frame prediction, larger block sizes, and variable block sizes to achieve better compression efficiency. The main difference between the two codecs is that VP9 has low compression ability, but not by much. It does however require lower CPU usage saving electricity. See the vp9 download on this website as well.
- 1080p video at 30 frames per second requires approximately 10-15 GFLOPS for VP9 encoding
The compression performance shows that generally the HEVC does provide better compression efficiency than VP9. However, the difference in quality is often minimal, especially when both codecs are used at high bitrates. Moreover, the computational complexity of HEVC makes it more difficult to encode and decode in real-time, which can be a disadvantage for certain applications.
