Comment by cornstalks
2 years ago
I've always felt like H.264 hit a great sweet spot of complexity vs compression. Newer codecs compress better, but they're increasingly complex in a nonlinear way.
2 years ago
I've always felt like H.264 hit a great sweet spot of complexity vs compression. Newer codecs compress better, but they're increasingly complex in a nonlinear way.
Doesn't every state of the art codec do that, including H.264 versus previous?
Also I haven't seen charts of decode difficulty, but as far as encoding goes, codecs a generation more advanced can crush H.264 at any particular level of effort. The even newer codecs can probably get there too with more encoder work. https://engineering.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/AV1-Co...
Generally yes, but I wasn't only talking about compute costs. Mentally grokking H.264's features and inner workings is a lot easier than newer, better codecs.
H.264 will probably never die, especially once all the patents expire in a few years.
H.262 has a long future too. New DVDs and OTA broadcasts (at least for ATSC 1.0) will probably end at some point, but the discs won't go away for a long time, even if disc players are less and less popular.
…you mean MPEG2?
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This is true, but I think I settled on either VP8 or VP9 because it's already widely supported, and it's part of webm, so people will maintain support just for backwards compatibility.
When do they expire?
According to https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_M..., probably September 2027.
There are an additional two patents on that list that expire in 2028 and 2030, but it's not clear if they apply. So probably November 2030 at the latest.
It also benefits from the extremely optimized encoder x264, which has many easily approachable tunings and speed/compression presets.
I’m not sure I’d trust x265 to preserve film grain better than x264 —tune film unless I gave x265 much, much more time as well as pretty similar bitrate.
x265 has a specific "--tune grain" mode specifically for video with a lot of film grain.
Apologies, I did miss that. However it seems to still underperform.
See this thread, screenshots on the first page.
http://forum.doom9.net/showthread.php?p=1947856#post1947856
I was remembering from this a couple years ago, but focused on the parameters shown and missed that they were derived from --tune grain.
But with hardware acceleration for both encoding and decoding of HEVC it feels like less of a problem IMO.
Video piracy is pretty much all in HEVC
Uhh, not in my experience. Its extremely difficult to find h265 sources for a large majority of content. Its basically a meme where if you tell people you want to try and get h265 by default, they talk down to you like "why would you do that".
From https://trash-guides.info/Misc/x265-4k/
> Something like 95% of video files are x264 and have much better direct play support.
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I think the big switch will happen once most people have TV's that can do 10bit color and true HDR. H264 can definitely do 10 bit but I'm not sure how well it handles higher dynamic range content (or if it even can) but H265 definitely can.
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Not really. Only 4k content and anime seems to use HEVC/h265. Anything lower resolution has stuck to h264 for the time being.
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MPEG 5 EVC Baseline, arguably the improved / refined version of H.264, actually compress better while having the same complexity, Both in terms of mental model and computational cost.
Somewhat unfortunate that never became anything.
Twitch... I just had DiVX vs Xvid flashbacks