alt Hacker NewsOnce 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.)
>(MP3 is in a similar place. AAC and Opus are technically superior, but everything supports MP3.)
Actually MP3 is more like the H.263 / Divx here. AAC-LC is more like H.264. The difference in support of AAC-LC and MP3 is near zero, both in terms of hardware and software. While AAC-LC is vastly more superior. AAC-LC has been declared patent free ( all patent expired ) by Redhat for 9 years already.
The only part that is not perfect is there isn't a decent open source AAC-LC encoder. While you could use QAAC using Apple's encoder in iTunes. It would still have been better if there was an open source version. Luckily we just have a new AAC encoder with FFmpeg, it is doing great for and although sill not Apple's quality. But hopefully improve in the future.
Or Apple could have just open source the god damn thing.