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jchwlast Sunday at 7:00 PM2 repliesview on HN

I would hope so! Otherwise the Pareto front wouldn't have moved in ~20 years which would be rather hard to believe.

However, at the same time, h265, h266 and AV1 are all vastly more complicated, and will have less broad hardware acceleration support than h264, which, again, even if it is not optimally efficient use of compute, just doesn't require a whole lot by modern standards.

So I'd argue there is really no reason to be rushing away from h264 unless you have a compelling reason. There are some obvious compelling reasons in some cases; nobody is going to be terribly surprised that an entity like Netflix is eager to switch to codecs that will save bandwidth, because at their scale saving bytes definitely adds up, bonus points if it can increase the quality at the same time.

On the other hand, though, unless you are absolutely sure you can switch to only new codecs, you will probably want to keep some h264 encodings around to act as a fallback baseline for legacy devices. And thus, you also have to take into account the complexity brought on by needing to store and maintain multiple encodings - in many use cases, like simple <video>s thrown into website backgrounds, I can see just eating the extra bandwidth costs and keeping it all h264 as a valid strategy.


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duskwufflast Sunday at 10:56 PM

Once the patents expire, I expect to see H.264 become the JPEG of video codecs - it may not be the most efficient format available, but it's widely supported, relatively easy to encode/decode, and good enough quality for many use cases.

(MP3 is in a similar place. AAC and Opus are technically superior, but everything supports MP3.)

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Dylan16807last Sunday at 8:53 PM

Well a lot of the improvements cost more computation. I wouldn't be surprised if low-computation video had only improved slightly, but it seems like it has improved a lot. The advantage of h264 is hardware adoption much more than actually being computationally cheap, it seems? Well, maybe. The thing is, I don't know how the decoders scale. Can you make a decoder for a constrained AV1/h.265 in the same hardware space or maximum CPU budget as an h.264 decoder and still see very big advantages?