# The Bjontegaard Bible -- Why your Way of Comparing Video Codecs May Be Wrong

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.12852 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12852/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 25 Apr 2023.

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [UGAE: Unified Geometry and Attribute Enhancement for G-PCC Compressed Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23009/) (2025)
- [SineLoRADelta: Sine-Activated Delta Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21895/) (2025)
- [Energy-Aware Frame Rate Selection for Video Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.18305/) (2026)
- [DUGAE: Unified Geometry and Attribute Enhancement via Spatiotemporal Correlations for G-PCC Compressed Dynamic Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26183/) (2026)
- [PaaF: Raising the perceived quality of INR-Based Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.21655/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we provide an in-depth assessment on the Bjontegaard Delta. We construct a large data set of video compression performance comparisons using a diverse set of metrics including PSNR, VMAF, bitrate, and processing energies. These metrics are evaluated for visual data types such as classic perspective video, 360^circ video, point clouds, and screen content. As compression technology, we consider multiple hybrid video codecs as well as state-of-the-art neural network based compression methods. Using additional supporting points inbetween standard points defined by parameters such as the quantization parameter, we assess the interpolation error of the Bjontegaard-Delta (BD) calculus and its impact on the final BD value. From the analysis, we find that the BD calculus is most accurate in the standard application of rate-distortion comparisons with mean errors below 0.5 percentage points. For other applications and special cases, e.g., VMAF quality, energy considerations, or inter-codec comparisons, the errors are higher (up to 5 percentage points), but can be halved by using a higher number of supporting points. We finally come up with recommendations on how to use the BD calculus such that the validity of the resulting BD-values is maximized. Main recommendations are as follows: First, relative curve differences should be plotted and analyzed. Second, the logarithmic domain should be used for saturating metrics such as SSIM and VMAF. Third, BD values below a certain threshold indicated by the subset error should not be used to draw recommendations. Fourth, using two supporting points is sufficient to obtain rough performance estimates.