The main goal of this paper is to evaluate the performance of the proposed new video coding standard, the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), also known as H.265. This evaluation considers mainly a comparison with the baseline profile of H.264/AVC encoder in terms of: compression efficiency, the video quality achieved by decoding the video signal at the receiver, and the computational complexity of encoding and decoding algorithms. As material test are used different spatial resolutions of video and also videos with different temporal and spatial information parameters. For video quality assessment are used two objective metrics, PSNR and SSIM. Furthermore, a transcoding H.264/HEVC scenario is evaluated considering the cascade method, which is very important for the first service applications that will use HEVC. The results indicate that compressed video file sizes using HEVC is 40-52% in relation with H.264 depending of the video content type without any significant video quality degradation at the receiver. © 2013 IEEE.