How Efficient is HEVC?

The new High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) / H.265 standard is expected to be more efficient than its predecessor, H.264 Advanced Video Coding. Just how much better it will perform is a crucial question. Will it be enough of an improvement to justify widespread industry adoption of the new standard?

Bin Li, Gary Sullivan and Jizheng Xu published a performance comparison between H.264/AVC and Working Draft 4 of HEVC in November 2011. You can find the full document and results here:

Document JCTVC-G399

Table 4 of the document compares the compression performance of the HEVC test model ("HM") and the H.264 test model ("JM"). On average, HEVC out-performs H.264 by 39% for random access scenarios (e.g. broadcast) and by 44% for low delay scenarios (e.g. video calling).

This means that the HEVC codec can achieve the same quality as H.264 with a bitrate saving of around 39-44%.

HEVC is still under development and we might expect to see a further increase in performance from future versions of the draft standard.