  The adoption of video conferencing and video communication services,
accelerated by COVID-19, has driven a rapid increase in video data traffic. The
demand for higher resolutions and quality, the need for immersive video
formats, and the newest, more complex video codecs increase the energy
consumption in data centers and display devices. In this paper, we explore and
compare the energy consumption across optimized state-of-the-art video codecs,
SVT-AV1, VVenC/VVdeC, VP9, and x.265. Furthermore, we align the energy usage
with various objective quality metrics and the compression performance for a
set of video sequences across different resolutions. The results indicate that
from the tested codecs and configurations, SVT-AV1 provides the best tradeoff
between energy consumption and quality. The reported results aim to serve as a
guide towards sustainable video streaming while not compromising the quality of
experience of the end user.
