H.264 Is Magic (2016)

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

56•ea016•49m ago

Comments

dzdt•37m ago

Article is dated (2016).

pwython•23m 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•20m ago

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

Dylan16807•9m ago

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

alt227•3m ago

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

shevy-java•12m ago

We need one final video codec.

Otherwise we will have this:

https://xkcd.com/927/

Dylan16807•6m 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•4m 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•8m 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•19m 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•15m 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•10m 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•9m 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•12m 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•12m ago

The only question I have:

Should I use H.264 or H.265?

alt227•5m ago

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

quibono•4m 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•11m ago

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

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H.264 Is Magic (2016)

Comments

We're releasing the weights of Mistral Large 4

H.264 Is Magic (2016)

Grace Blackwell needs a new scheduler: 27% more usable GPUs from the same racks

Zombie stats: Where the numbers AI quotes come from

DoorDash to Acquire Instacart

Chained PHP2Shell Exploit Roots 25 Servers, Including US Government Servers

Launch HN: Simantic (YC F26) – Firmware Simulation for AI Agents

Mexico is a showroom for electric vehicles you can't buy in the U.S.

noalloc: Tooling and libraries to enforce zero heap allocations in Golang

Qwenputer: A functioning, deterministic RISC-V CPU inside Qwen3.5

Java's new AOT cache feature is in a rough state

Are Stochastic Parrots Alive?

LLM Voice

Zero click, silent, remote Android DoS

Why is this fingerprinting script creating bioweapons?

Keplearn: Extract Equations from Data in Seconds

Newly discovered Kerberos delegation abuse path

Gemini 4 Carbon is the new #1 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5

Getting debug access on a Brother printer over Telnet

How Google determines the names for bodies of water in Google Earth

The US added a record 20.2 GWh of battery storage in just 3 months

Hackers expose the identities of more than 40k DHS employees

Forging a Microsoft Edge Full Chain with Logic Bugs Only

Southern Africa's first known stenciled rock art found hiding in plain sight

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OpenAI's agents talked to each other through the CPU Cache

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StackOverflow now gets fewer than 1000 questions a month

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