A comparison of audio and video codecs

This page presents the difference between codecs. We talk about lossy compression, since the goal is to deliver the best quality over a specified bitrate. For audio, there's lossless compression (FLAC or TrueHD), but these won't matter here.

Audio

MP3

The MP3 (or MPEG-1 audio layer 3) is the most frequently heard music format that is supported by a lot of devices and software. The MP3 was first released in august of 1993 and even now it will stay the most known format. Even though it's popular, it's not the best one.

AAC-LC

The AAC-LC (Low complexity AAC) is the MPEG audio's newer codec that is part of the MPEG-4 standard. Earlier it was in MPEG-2, but later moved over to MPEG-4 and first released in 1999. The AAC can be found in video recordings of phones and on most social sites. Personally, it's better to use than MP3. Huge pro is that it can be put into an MPEG-4 container with the .m4a extension.

HE-AAC

The HE-AAC (low complexity AAC audio with SBR extension) is a heavier version of AAC that can compress even better. HE-AAC was first released in 2003 for the MPEG-4 standard. This audio compression is used on TikTok and Spotify (on low setting).

HE-AAC v2

HE-AAC v2 (low complexity AAC audio with SBR extension and parametric stereo) is HE-AAC's extended version that was first released 1 year after HE-AAC in 2004, again for the MPEG-4 standard.

Opus

The Opus is developed by the Xiph.org foundation and first released on August 26th, 2012. Opus is used by YouTube and the WebM container's default audio codec.

Vorbis

Vorbis is also developed by Xiph.org and libvorbis was first released it on July 19th, 2002. Vorbis is the OGG container's default audio codec.

Video

Compressing video is more complex and that's why most encoders have a lot of settings. Not only the bitrate defines the quality, but the encoder's preset.

Note:
- The coded video in in Full HD resolution (1920x1080) and runs at 24 FPS.
- The slow presets just mean that the CPU spends more time with encoding. On faster presets, it spends less time.

H.264

The H.264 (AVC or MPEG-4 part 10) is the most frequently used video codec that was first released in 2003. It's basically used on most platforms, since the encoding speed and quality is somewhat acceptable, perfect for streaming. H.264 is part of the MPEG-4 stndard and it's the default video codec for MP4, MOV, MKV containers.

H.265

The H.265 (a.k.a. HEVC, or MPEG-H part 2) is the successor of H.264 that was first released by MPEG on June 7th, 2013 for the MPEG-H standard. For example, the codec is used by TikTok and Facebook.

VP9

The VP9 was developed by Google that was released 10 days after HEVC, on June 17th, 2013. The codec is mainly used on YouTube and it's one of the WebM container's codec.

AV1

The AV1 is developed by AOM (Alliance for Open Media) that was first released on March 28th, 2018. The codec is also used on YouTube and another codec for the WebM container.
For the AV1, there's three software encoder, I used two for this comparison: libaom-av1 and libsvtav1. libaom-av1 is the best quality software encoder, but its drawback is the poor performance, since encoding such AV1 video is complex. That's why Intel and Netflix cooperated and created the libsvtav1 encoder library. libsvtav1 focuses on performance, sacrificing quality for real-time application.

Sources:

MP3
AAC
HE-AAC and HE-AAC v2
Opus
Vorbis
H.264
HEVC
VP9
AV1
Encoded video's source (Pexels)

The encoded videos is for personal use and only for examples. The original video is highly recommended to use from the original site, it's also free to use.

The encoded music is the same case.

Song: Jim Yosef - Link [NCS Release]
Music provided by NoCopyrightSounds
Free Download/Stream: http://ncs.io/Link
Watch: http://youtu.be/9iHM6X6uUH8