Netflix Technology Blog — Performance comparison of video coding standards: an adaptive streaming perspective

By Joel Sole, Liwei Guo, Andrey Norkin, Mariana Afonso, Kyle Swanson, Anne Aaron

At Netflix, we are continually refining the recipes we use to serve your favorite shows and movies at the best possible quality. An essential element in this dish is the video encoding technology we use to transform our video content into compressed bitstreams (suitable for whatever bandwidth you happen to be enjoying Netflix at). A fantastic amount of work has been done by the video coding community to develop video coding standards (codecs) with the goal of achieving always better compression ratios. Therefore, an essential task is the assessment of the quality of the ingredients we use and, in the Netflix encoding kitchen, we do this by regularly evaluating the performance of existing and upcoming video codecs and encoders. We select the freshest and best encoding technologies so that you can savor our content, from the satiating cinematography of Salt Fat Acid Heat to the gorgeous food shots of Chef’s Table… READ MORE