Comment by shanemhansen
14 hours ago
> AV1 streaming sessions achieve VMAF scores¹ that are 4.3 points higher than AVC and 0.9 points higher than HEVC sessions. At the same time, AV1 sessions use one-third less bandwidth than both AVC and HEVC, resulting in 45% fewer buffering interruptions.
Just thought I'd extract the part I found interesting as a performance engineer.
This VMAF comparison is to be taken with a grain of salt. Netflix' primary goal was to reduce the bitrate consumption, as can be seen, while roughly keeping the same nominal quality of the stream. This means that, ignoring all other factors and limitations of H.264 with higher resolutions, VMAF scores for all their streaming sessions should roughly be the same, or in a comparable range, because that's what they're optimizing for. (See the Dynamic Optimizer Framework they have publicly posted a few years ago.)
Still impressive numbers, of course.