Assessment of the compression efficiency of the MPEG-4 AVC specification

Video coding is used under the hood of a lot of multimedia applications, such as video conferencing, digital storage media, television broadcasting. and internet streaming. Recently, new standards-based and proprietary technologies have emerged. An interesting problem is how to evaluate these different video coding solutions in terms of delivered quality. In this paper, a PSNR-based approach is applied in order to compare the coding potential of H.264/AVC AHM 2.0 with the compression efficiency of XviD 0.9.1, DivX 5.05, Windows Media Video 9, and MC-EZBC. Our results show that MPEG-4-based tools, and in particular H.264/AVC, can keep step with proprietary solutions. The rate-distortion performance of MC-EZBC, a wavelet-based video codec, looks very promising too