This paper presents a study comparing the coding efficiency performance of three video codecs: (a) the Versatile Video Coding (VVC); (b) AV1 codec of the Alliance for Open Media (AOM); and (c) the MPEG-5 Essential Video Coding (EVC). Two approaches to coding were used: (i) constant quality (QP) for VVC, AV1, EVC; and (ii) target bit rate (VBR) for AV1. Constant quality encoding is performed with all the three codecs for an unbiased comparison of the core coding tools. Whereas, target bitrate coding is done with the AV1 codec to study the compression efficiency achieved with rate control, which can and does have a significant impact. Performance is tabulated for on two fronts: (1) objective performance based on PSNR’s and (2) informal subjective assessment. Our general conclusion derived from the assessment of objective metrics and subjective evaluation is that VVC appears to be superior to AV1 and EVC under both constant quality and target bitrate coding. However, relative to currently popular codecs such as AVC and HEVC, that difference is modest.
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