Performance Comparison of HEVC and H.264/AVC Standards in Broadcasting Environments

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is the most recent video codec standard of the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group and the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group. The main goal of this newly introduced standard is for catering to high-resolution video in low bandwidth environments with a higher compression ratio. This paper provides a performance comparison between HEVC and H.264/AVC video compression standards in terms of objective quality, delay, and complexity in the broadcasting environment. The experimental investigation was carried out using six test sequences in the random access configuration of the HEVC test model (HM), the HEVC reference software. This was also carried out in similar configuration settings of the Joint Scalable Video Module (JSVM), the official scalable H.264/AVC reference implementation, running on a single layer mode. According to the results obtained, the HM achieves more than double the compression ratio compared to that of JSVM and delivers the same video quality at half the bitrate. Yet, the HM encodes two times slower (at most) than JSVM. Hence, it can be concluded that the application scenarios of HM and JSVM should be judiciously selected considering the availability of system resources. For instance, HM is not suitable for low delay applications, but it can be used effectively in low bandwidth environments.