When a video codec wins an Emmy

Posted by todsacerdoti 4 days ago

Comments

Comment by drmpeg 59 minutes ago

Here's the Emmy that C-Cube Microsystems won back in 1995 for the MPEG-2 (actually unconstrained MPEG-1) encoder chip set used in the roll-out of DirecTV.

https://www.w6rz.net/DCP_1235.JPG

The original DirecTV encoder was MPEG-1 at 704x480 using eight CL4000 chips. Then in 1995 when the MPEG-2 capable CL4010 was finished, the encoders were upgraded to MPEG-2 (frame only encoding). Then upgraded again to a 12 chip AFF (Adaptive Field/Frame) encoder when the firmware was completed.

https://www.w6rz.net/videorisc.png

Comment by ChrisArchitect 4 days ago

AV1 powers approximately 30% of Netflix viewing

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46155135

Comment by bibimsz 59 minutes ago

when is C going to win a Pulitzer?

Comment by shmerl 2 hours ago

> AV1 is also the foundation for the image format AVIF, which is deployed across browsers and provides excellent compression for still and animated images

I wish adoption was better. When will Wikipedia support AVIF?

Comment by bjoli 1 hour ago

What does it bring over jpegxl?

Comment by shmerl 1 hour ago

Way wider browser adoption, potential to evolve together with AV#, since it's using a container format, so it shouldn't be limited to AV1 base. I.e. sites just need to adopt AVIF, and I expect then seamless ability to start using AV2 (and on) there without sites needing another wave of adding a new mime type and etc. which seems to be a huge hurdle.

Same as let's say Webm can contain AV1, AV2 etc.

Comment by 1 hour ago

Comment by brcmthrowaway 2 hours ago

I'm confused - why aren't video codecs winner take all?

Who still uses paten encumbered codecs and why?

Comment by notatoad 2 hours ago

video decoding on a general-purpose cpu is difficult, so most devices that can play video include some sort of hardware video decoding chip. if you want your video to play well, you need to deliver it in a format that can be decoded by that chip, on all the devices that you want to serve.

so it takes a long time to transition to a new codec - new devices need to ship with support for your new codec, and then you have to wait until old devices get lifecycled out before you can fully drop support for old codecs.

Comment by DoctorOW 2 hours ago

Backwards compatibility. If you host a lot of compressed video content, you probably didn't store the uncompressed versions so any new encoding is a loss of fidelity. Even if you were willing to take that gamble, you have to wait until all your users are on a modern enough browser to use the new codec. Frankly, the winner that takes all is H.264 because it's already everywhere.

Comment by MallocVoidstar 2 hours ago

AV1 is still worse in practice than H.265 for high-fidelity (high bitrate) encoding. It's being improved, but even at high bitrates it has a tendency to blur.