Today, several alternatives for compression of digital pictures and video sequences exist to choose from. Beside internationally recognized standard solutions, open access options like the VP8 image and video compression have recently appeared and are gaining popularity. In this paper, we present the methodology and the results of the rate-distortion performance analysis of VP8. The analysis is based on the results of subjective quality assessment experiments, which have been carried out to compare the two algorithms to a set of state of the art image and video compression standards.