[Hupo]

That he has. My test clip choice was inspired by him[1], and I also link to another blog post of his[2] in the conclusion. That VP8 blog post is almost three years old now, though, and the comment I'm replying to in my article claimed that VP8 is better than H.264 "at this point". This is why I did my test with the latest and greatest encoders available for both formats today.

[1] http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=154430

[2] http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/472

[sounds]

I think it would be interesting to do a follow-up comparison h264 vs VP8 for mobile. 1080p vbr targetting ~7 Mbps, 480p vbr targetting ~2.5 Mbps, etc.

It's important to explore the space a bit for discussion's sake.

[gillianseed]

I think it would be more interesting to compare VP9 with HEVC (h.265), I know the VP9 experimental branch can easily be checked out and tested, but I don't know of where to find HEVC encoders (although I'm sure they exist with some Google fu).

Obviously there are problems with testing unfinished implementations, as:

A) they are generally VERY slow given that there's little optimization during the development phase, and these next gen video codecs are more demanding than the previous generation

B) a great deal of the quality comes from fine-tuning during implementation, not from the specification. For example x264 is a 'best-in-class' implementation of h.264, readily beating many other implementations of the very same specification.

As such, this fine-tuning is not likely to exist until the codec implementations mature, which likely means that what is available now of HEVC/VP9 serves only as very rough estimates.

Would still interesting though :)