Media Encoding — H.265 / HEVC

Nowadays, all video that's consumed is compressed using various codecs, whether on TV, physical media, or streamed over the Internet. Our first video-encoding test uses the fairly new H.265 codec, which is also known as HEVC. We compress a full HD video using the latest version of the X265 encoder, with 8-bit color depth, preset "slow," and a quality setting of crf 20.

Media Encoding — H.264 / AVC

H.264, also called AVC, is a slightly older compression format, though probably the most widely used compression format these days because it is well supported in even older hardware. We compress the same video as in the H.265 test using the X264 encoding software, with preset "slower" and crf 20.

Media Encoding — MP3

MP3 revolutionized the music industry like no other technology. Introduced in the 90s, it enabled massive reduction in audio-file sizes without noticeable impact on sound quality. This made music downloads, and ultimately streaming, a feasible method of content delivery over the Internet. For our benchmark, we convert a 2.5 hour-long 44.1 kHz Stereo recording to a variable bitrate MP3 file. MP3 encoding is a single-threaded process.