Comparison of VP8 and H.264

Google released the open-source WebM multimedia framework last week:
http://www.webmproject.org/
WebM includes the VP8 video codec.

Streamingmedia.com has published a comparison between VP8 and H.264:
http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/First-Look-H.264-and-VP8-Compared-67266.aspx

- Iain

High Efficiency Video Coding Standard

Work is continuing on the new video coding standard, currently known as "High Efficiency Video Coding" (HEVC). A Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC) has been set up by ISO/IEC MPEG and ITU-T VCEG. Following a Call for Proposals in January, 27 proposals were submitted to the first meeting of the JCT-VC in April. Elements of some of these proposals have been combined to develop an initial Test Model, a starting point for development of the new standard. The initial Test Model has similarities to earlier standards such as H.264/AVC, including block-based intra/inter prediction, block transform and entropy coding. New features include increased prediction flexibility, more sophisticated interpolation filters, a wider range of block sizes and new entropy coding schemes. Coding performance varies across the different proposals. It looks like we might expect to see a 2x compression improvement compared with H.264/AVC (i.e. half the bitrate at the same visual quality), at the expense of a significant increase in computational complexity (perhaps 3x or more). You can find the technical proposals here.