Comment by szemet

I was a bit disappointed in this article for the same reason: this is a great primer for people new to MPEG video compression, but it doesn't have anything to do with H.264.

I was hoping the author would write about H.264 specifically, for instance, how it was basically the "dumping ground" of all the little tweaks and improvements that were pulled out of MPEG-4 for one reason or another (usually because they were too computationally expensive), and why, as a result, it has thousands of different combinations of features that are extremely complicated to support, which is why it had to be grouped into "profiles" (e.g., Baseline, Main, High): http://blog.mediacoderhq.com/h264-profiles-and-levels/

I was also hoping that he would at least touch on the features that make H.264 unique from previous MPEG standards, like in-loop deblocking, CABAC Entropy Coding, etc..

Again, it's fine as an introduction to video encoding, but there's nothing in here specific to H.264.

Sure, but also keep in mind that the technology hasn't changed much over time. Even HEVC, which causes extreme gains in compression on high-res video with minimal loss in quality, is still mostly the same algorithm as H.264 but with larger blocks, slightly more flexible coding units rather than frame-wide interpolation changes, and 35 rather than 9 directions recognized for predictions.

Also the fleeting mention of b-frames, which mpeg-1 doesn't have. And I believe mpeg-1 doesn't use 16×16 macroblocks.

Still, it's a good overview of generic video compression.

"This post will give insight into some of the details at a high level - I hope to not bore you too much with the intricacies."

Did you miss the third paragraph?

As someone who knew nothing about it before, I found it lived up to it's goal.