When a video codec wins an Emmy
55 points
4 days ago
| 3 comments
| blog.mozilla.org
| HN
ChrisArchitect
4 days ago
[-]
Related:

AV1 powers approximately 30% of Netflix viewing

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46155135

reply
shmerl
57 minutes ago
[-]
> AV1 is also the foundation for the image format AVIF, which is deployed across browsers and provides excellent compression for still and animated images

I wish adoption was better. When will Wikipedia support AVIF?

reply
brcmthrowaway
56 minutes ago
[-]
I'm confused - why aren't video codecs winner take all?

Who still uses paten encumbered codecs and why?

reply
notatoad
31 minutes ago
[-]
video decoding on a general-purpose cpu is difficult, so most devices that can play video include some sort of hardware video decoding chip. if you want your video to play well, you need to deliver it in a format that can be decoded by that chip, on all the devices that you want to serve.

so it takes a long time to transition to a new codec - new devices need to ship with support for your new codec, and then you have to wait until old devices get lifecycled out before you can fully drop support for old codecs.

reply
DoctorOW
43 minutes ago
[-]
Backwards compatibility. If you host a lot of compressed video content, you probably didn't store the uncompressed versions so any new encoding is a loss of fidelity. Even if you were willing to take that gamble, you have to wait until all your users are on a modern enough browser to use the new codec. Frankly, the winner that takes all is H.264 because it's already everywhere.
reply
MallocVoidstar
31 minutes ago
[-]
AV1 is still worse in practice than H.265 for high-fidelity (high bitrate) encoding. It's being improved, but even at high bitrates it has a tendency to blur.
reply