New VVC, AV1 and AVS3 Codecs: a Subjective Comparison by MSU

Dear colleagues!

We are glad to announce that the Subjective Video Codecs Comparison Report 2021 has been released!

• Participated codecs: Aurora AV1, Phoenix265, QAV1, QAVS3, rav1e, Reference x265, S266, SIF Codec, SVT-HEVC, SVT-VP9, Tencent V265, VVenC, x264, x265, xin26x (HEVC), xin26x (VVC)
• 15 FullHD Videos
• 10,800+ subjects involved in visual comparisons
• You can download free version of the report (PDF & HTML, 35 Mb) or purchase enterprise version which contains links to source videos, more metrics and results

General Conclusions

For subjective quality measurements we used Subjectify.us crowdsourcing platform. We involved 10,800+ participants with a total of 529,171 pairwise answers. We used Bradley-Terry model to compute global rank. Here you can find details on comparison methodology.

The winners are:

• S266 by Alibaba Group with very good results: up to 3.4x bitrate economy for the same subjective quality compared to Reference x265
• Aurora AV1 by Visionular
• QAVS3 by iQIYI

We linearly interpolated final subjective scores to get continuous rate-distortion (RD) curves, which show the relationship between the real bitrate (i.e., the actual bitrate of the encoded stream) and the quality score. You can find more RD curves for comparison in our report.

Bitrate-subjective quality curves of participating encoders for crowd_run video sequence

Future Work

This is the second part of the comparison. You can find results of the first part (FullHD objective) here on LinkedIn or on our website.

We are currently preparing reports for 4K, Cloud, and FPGA comparisons. Subscribe to receive notifications about further reports on MSU Video Codecs Comparisons 2021. Approximate dates of reports releases are presented here.

We kindly invite you to leave any feedback and are open to suggestions for our further comparisons.

Stay tuned!