Multimedia Codec Evaluation and Overview

Sammanfattning: Movies, songs, conferences, video streams and other multimedia services are spreading in everybody’s life, needs and work. Different types of audio and video codecs of various qualities appear to be used for different purposes. However, each codec can be suitable for a special usage, as for example a codec that can be use for high quality film may not be suitable for streaming it into network. The main purpose of this thesis is to compare the performance of different codecs in one particular scenario and indicate which codec performance is the best. The thesis work includes the investigation of several codec aspects (audio and video) and problems related to choosing a multimedia codec (coder/decoder) suitable for large-scale multimedia distribution over the Internet. More specifically, the work focuses on various features of modern media codecs, compares them and finds the best application for each of them. Furthermore, the thesis provides an overview of available research results related to this work and codec comparison tables for codecs and their features. Additionally, as part of this work, a testbed was developed to measure the performance of codecs when used to stream media over a network. The testbed enabled the collection of various QoS parameters, such as bandwidth usage and burst, size for each codec considered in this thesis.