H.264 Is Magic (2016)

https://sidbala.com/h-264-is-magic/

56•ea016•47m ago

Comments

dzdt•35m ago

Article is dated (2016).

pwython•21m ago

Ten years later, 2026 magic: AV1

https://engineering.fb.com/2026/06/22/video-engineering/adop...

And soon AV2

https://av2.aomedia.org/

HumblyTossed•18m ago

And maybe ten more and enough hardware will support it that it will be mainstream.

Dylan16807•7m ago

AV1? It's mainstream already. Lots of hardware supports it and you don't need hardware support for many other cases.

alt227•1m ago

Mainstream? The most popular hardware streaming device (Nvidia shield) does not even support it, so I wouldnt call it mainstream.

shevy-java•10m ago

We need one final video codec.

Otherwise we will have this:

https://xkcd.com/927/

Dylan16807•4m ago

At any point in time there's only a couple video codecs you should be using. When we can repeatedly shave off 30% of video bandwidth, there's no reason to stop making one or two new ones every decade.

aktenlage•2m ago

There is no need to have a final one. It's no problem to keep supporting older codecs and add new ones in new products, as long as there's a "common ground" of widely supported codecs.

echelon•6m ago

I feel as though AI is going to blow these all out of the water soon.

And then we'll get AI-designed hardware codecs for them.

HelloUsername•17m ago

Previous discussions:

4.nov.2016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12871403 219 comments

17.mar.2022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30710574 219 comments

24.may.2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19997813 180 comments

14.jun.2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40681306 205 comments

WhitneyLand•13m ago

"The H.264 video, 300 frames long is 175KB. A single frame of that video in PNG is 1015KB. It looks like we're storing 300 times the amount of data in the video. But the file size is a fifth. So H.264 would seem to be 1500x as efficient as PNG. How is this even possible? All right, what's the trick?"

Mostly the trick is they're comparing lossy to lossless compression which doesn't even make any sense.

Dylan16807•8m ago

It makes tons of sense to compare those numbers. It's a big part of how you benchmark lossy compression. I guess in some sense they should use BMP instead of PNG but it's arguable.

nomel•7m ago

Yes, as they explain shortly after, in the next section "shedding weight".

They're not actually confused here. It's a writing style, where you pose an interesting problem/scenario, then explain it.

tvelichkov•10m ago

This reminds me that I still haven't watched `part 2` of a very nice video from 3Blue1Brown - "Compression is Intelligence". YouTube suggestions, definitely failed me with this one.

shevy-java•10m ago

The only question I have:

Should I use H.264 or H.265?

alt227•2m ago

H.264 for 1080p and less. H.265 for 2160p.

quibono•2m ago

It depends on how you want to play or share the media.

E.g. I remember having lots of issues sharing smaller video files encoded with H.265 via both WhatsApp and Messenger. iMessage doesn't support H.265 (or at least it didn't work for me at the time).

rishabhd•9m ago

It is tradition to re-read this every year. Along with the m1 blackmagic one.

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