It’s September, so as usual Zetacast was in Amsterdam to participate in IBC, the International Broadcasting Convention. A total of 55,092 people from 170 countries visited IBC this year, the largest ever level of attendance.

Zetacast’s Ken McCann presented a paper at the IBC technical conference, describing the collaborative work  on HEVC verification testing that had been performed earlier this year in JCT-VC. This was the first thorough comparison of the HEVC and H.264/AVC standards based on formal subjective testing.

A total of 20 sequences were tested, covering four video resolutions. For these sequences, HEVC gave an average bit rate saving of 59%, indicating that the HEVC design goal of doubling the compression efficiency had actually been slightly exceeded. There was a noticeable pattern of of increasing bit rate saving with increasing video resolution:
• 52% for 480p
• 56% for 720p
• 62% for 1080p
• 64% for 4K UHD-1 (2160p)

The slides that Ken presented at IBC can be downloaded from here.