Comment by mistercow
9 years ago
I'm not sure that you need mobile hardware encoding to drive initial adoption. As long as streaming services and the like can start using it to save bandwidth, you have a clear win for a big segment of the market. Older codecs can serve just fine for mobile encoding until the hardware catches up. But if most existing phones can't decode it efficiently, it's going to be pretty stuck until that situation changes.
I'd argue that it's more important to get encoders working, since re-encoding lossy->lossy is always a bad idea.
There isn’t really a video hosting site that doesnt do a lossy transcode of all uploads, unless you count Dropbox.
The bitrate used to encode real-time captures is generally two or more times greater than the bitrate you want to distribute.
Lossless 4K is 12 gigabit a second (even then there's chroma compression)
Nobody edits at that bitrate, compression is concattenated multiple times. How a codec copes with real world multi-compression is key.
4K is common in TV production. In my experience lossy compression is a big no-no in TV and they do edit 4K losslessly, although in order to transfer it they generally split it as 4 times 3G links (either interleaving the pixels or generating a 2x2 mosaic). 12G links exist but 4x3G is still vastly more popular due to being backward compatible with existing equipment. Color correction, scaling, blending and compositing are all generally done with uncompressed video.
Of course once mastered the video gets heavily compressed to be sent to the consumers.
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> Nobody edits at that bitrate
Interesting. Not even as a final rendering step after everything has been done in a compressed "preview mode"?
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And yet, you'll be astonished to learn how many times each video is lossy-lossy re-encoded on its way from camera to end viewer.