YHK - yet another hacker news clone

H.264 Is Magic (2016)

125 points ea016 2 hours ago 56 comments

dzdt 1 hour ago | parent

Article is dated (2016).

pwython 1 hour ago | parent

Ten years later, 2026 magic: AV1

https://engineering.fb.com/2026/06/22/video-engineering/adop...

And soon AV2

https://av2.aomedia.org/

HumblyTossed 1 hour ago | parent

And maybe ten more and enough hardware will support it that it will be mainstream.

Dylan16807 1 hour ago | parent

AV1? It's mainstream already. Lots of hardware supports it and you don't need hardware support for many other cases.

alt227 1 hour ago | parent

Mainstream? The most popular hardware streaming device (Nvidia shield) does not even support it, so I wouldnt call it mainstream.

Firerouge 1 hour ago | parent

Isn't the latest shield hardware 7 year old at this point? Only one year newer than AV1 itself

duped 1 hour ago | parent

Niche luxury products aren't exactly mainstream either

judge2020 1 hour ago | parent

Nvidia Shield is hardly the most popular anything. Roku has 43% of the market and Amazon has 35%.

Would be interesting to see if we could segment third-party from TV-embedded (see quote), but the metrics from the article seem to reflect actual consumer usage, as most consumers just use what comes in the TV they buy nowadays.

> This reflects a consolidated approach and eliminates yet another device in the home, and it’s catching on, as just 34% consider streaming media players as their primary viewing device. Meanwhile, 56% said the same for smart TVs.

https://www.cepro.com/news/roku-amazon-lead-streaming-media-...

MadameMinty 1 hour ago | parent

av1_nvenc exists therefore it's mainstream :)

fishgoesblub 1 hour ago | parent

I would not consider the ancient Nvidia shield the "most popular" streaming device.

sanfus_grimmer 1 hour ago | parent

Nvidia hasn't released a new model of the Shield since 2019. The current Apple TV model, Google TV model, Roku model, Fire TV, and Onn models support AV1.

croes 13 minutes ago | parent

My $100 NUC has AV1 hardware decoder support.

Maybe a device from 2019 is a bad data point

pxoe 1 hour ago | parent

AV1 decode works well enough even on quite old devices, and it has more favorable quality and size, individually or when considering both. I prefer it to h264 (or vp9 or even h265) at this point, and there isn't a particular need for hardware decode to benefit from it. On Youtube (probably the biggest and most accessible source of av1 video), when comparing size and quality on different codecs (h264/vp9/av1), av1 is either gonna have much smaller size while keeping some level of quality, or have better quality at similar size, or even have both be better.

cubefox 18 minutes ago | parent

The first Apple chips with AV1 support only came out in 2023. So the majority of Apple hardware out there doesn't support it. It will be a long time till support is at >95%.

shevy-java 1 hour ago | parent

We need one final video codec.

Otherwise we will have this:

https://xkcd.com/927/

Dylan16807 1 hour ago | parent

At any point in time there's only a couple video codecs you should be using. When we can repeatedly shave off 30% of video bandwidth, there's no reason to stop making one or two new ones every decade.

aktenlage 1 hour ago | parent

There is no need to have a final one. It's no problem to keep supporting older codecs and add new ones in new products, as long as there's a "common ground" of widely supported codecs.

echelon 1 hour ago | parent

I feel as though AI is going to blow these all out of the water soon.

And then we'll get AI-designed hardware codecs for them.

cowlevel 40 minutes ago | parent

Or the AI will be the codec - intelligence is compression.

cubefox 16 minutes ago | parent

Yes, "neural" or "learned" video codecs are considered the future. They already have competitive compression ratios, but last thing I heard was that they are still much slower than conventional codecs.

qmr 41 minutes ago | parent

That's all well and good, but let me know when I can buy a used $50 NUC or pi or such that has hw decoding of the same for my TV front ends.

kccqzy 30 minutes ago | parent

Intel has supported native hardware decoder for AV1 since Tiger Lake. That’s quite old. You could buy a used NUC with Tiger Lake. Even when new a NUC with 1115G4 or 1135G7 isn’t expensive. I found one with damaged WiFi for $20. https://www.ebay.com/itm/366767313411 You can buy it now.

HelloUsername 1 hour ago | parent

Previous discussions:

4.nov.2016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12871403 219 comments

17.mar.2022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30710574 219 comments

24.may.2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19997813 180 comments

14.jun.2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40681306 205 comments

WhitneyLand 1 hour ago | parent

"The H.264 video, 300 frames long is 175KB. A single frame of that video in PNG is 1015KB. It looks like we're storing 300 times the amount of data in the video. But the file size is a fifth. So H.264 would seem to be 1500x as efficient as PNG. How is this even possible? All right, what's the trick?"

Mostly the trick is they're comparing lossy to lossless compression which doesn't even make any sense.

Dylan16807 1 hour ago | parent

It makes tons of sense to compare those numbers. It's a big part of how you benchmark lossy compression. I guess in some sense they should use BMP instead of PNG but it's arguable.

nomel 1 hour ago | parent

Yes, as they explain shortly after, in the next section "shedding weight".

They're not actually confused here. It's a writing style, where you pose an interesting problem/scenario, then explain it.

rob74 1 hour ago | parent

Actually I had the same thought, but this is obviously an article for people who don't know the difference between lossless and lossy compression. Ok, you might argue that it's not a good fit for HN, but going by the many times it seems to have been posted here, some people disagree.

tvelichkov 1 hour ago | parent

This reminds me that I still haven't watched `part 2` of a very nice video from 3Blue1Brown - "Compression is Intelligence". YouTube suggestions, definitely failed me with this one.

shevy-java 1 hour ago | parent

The only question I have:

Should I use H.264 or H.265?

alt227 1 hour ago | parent

H.264 for 1080p and less. H.265 for 2160p.

quibono 1 hour ago | parent

It depends on how you want to play or share the media.

E.g. I remember having lots of issues sharing smaller video files encoded with H.265 via both WhatsApp and Messenger. iMessage doesn't support H.265 (or at least it didn't work for me at the time).

qingcharles 52 minutes ago | parent

The main reason to use H.264 in 2026 is legacy device support. Some devices cannot play H.265, but H.264 is playable almost anywhere, as a 20+ year old codec.

I was surprised that Twitter only lets you upload H.264 still, in 2026.

qmr 38 minutes ago | parent

That all depends on your use case.

How are you generating video?

How are you playing it back?

F3nd0 37 minutes ago | parent

For personal use, if those are your only two choices, then go with H.265 for higher efficiency, or H.264 for wider compatibility. If other codecs are an option, go with AV1 for higher efficiency. It’s currently the best and already pretty widely supported.

rishabhd 1 hour ago | parent

It is tradition to re-read this every year. Along with the m1 blackmagic one.

whall6 1 hour ago | parent

Socrates was certainly a pioneer of conveying information efficiently

MadameMinty 1 hour ago | parent

Worth pointing out that PNG is also just awful and should probably die like BMP died. WebP was already available at the time this article was written:

PNG: 1039993 bytes - baseline

optimized*: 541539

WebP: 398974 - lossless mode, of course.

JPEG XL: 310778 - lossless, quick, and easy.

*after monumental compute effort; still probably some room for improvement but the effort is ridiculous.

ashleyn 1 hour ago | parent

WebP stands on its own merits but it's profoundly annoying that as of Pop OS 22.04 I still have to open them up in Firefox instead of Eye of Gnome. Compatibility issues like this are littered everywhere. This laziness on the part of supporting WebP is a significant driver of continued use of PNG.

MadameMinty 1 hour ago | parent

Yes, it's very disheartening. We're approaching two decades of WebP, after all. At this point it's not even worth implementing its support because JXL is superior in every use case.

Dwedit 37 minutes ago | parent

Not really, lossless WEBP still decodes much faster than lossless JXL, so if you need to decode the images faster, you use WEBP. Yes, you could also speculatively decode the JXL images to hide the decode time.

For lossy, neither is in a good place, since lossy AVIF beats both lossy JXL and lossy WEBP. Lossless AVIF is a joke and barely competes with PNG.

cubefox 10 minutes ago | parent

I think the case for JPEG XL is not that it's the best at everything, but that it is both quite good overall while also supporting basically every obscure image format feature under the sun. It's the potential USB of image formats.

MadameMinty 1 hour ago | parent

For completeness, my background job of the highest imaginable PNG compression yielded optimized: 528313 bytes. Took only several minutes...

F3nd0 42 minutes ago | parent

With JPEG XL finally being allowed into mainstream web browsers, we’ll hopefully see more native platform support and be able to slowly phase every older codec out, since JPEG XL does very well at more or less everything (except for animation, compared to video codecs).

Hasz 1 hour ago | parent

I really like the idea that compression is intelligence, there are so many tricks an interesting ideas related to it. A bunch of them are described in the article, but you can imagine a long tail of many more inscrutable tricks chained together to get really incredible shrinkage in data.

Hutter prize (I think mentioned in a 3b1b video somewhere else in this thread) is a great example. Given this was written before advent of LLM, I would love to see someone throw openAI/Anthropic levels of compute at a similar problem to see what the swarm can produce.

https://arxiv.org/html/2404.09937v1

augment_me 54 minutes ago | parent

The newest submissions to Hutter Prize made crazy jumps by just replacing the LSTM with a transformer and training it.

35'000$ for a prompt and some training is a nice chunk of cash.

Next steps are replacing the encoders and all the other human-biased compression parts by just raw data and training, probably another 20-30% is up for grabs.

kouru225 26 minutes ago | parent

I remember reading an article on here by one of the founders of MPEG about why he was leaving MPEG after several decades, and part of it was that modern AI is indistinguishable from compression and he wanted to explore new compression algorithms using the recent explosion of knowledge

ksec 45 minutes ago | parent

H.264 High Profile is close to Patent Free. [1] I often wonder how much more efficiency could we get if we were to increase block size outside of spec.

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_M...

Dwedit 43 minutes ago | parent

One year left before the "last major patent" expires.

kouru225 23 minutes ago | parent

Wait is this true? Will I finally be able to use h264 on da Vinci resolve for free?

Dwedit 28 minutes ago | parent

One uncommonly used feature of H.264 is support for lossless video. It's a bit hard to use due to tooling (not easy to discover and select the feature), and is sometimes incompatible with web browsers, but you can get actual lossless video using a mainstream video codec. You can verify that it really is lossless, and doesn't have any conversion step where it's quantized to 8-bit YUV.

"x264vfw" is one tool which supports this format, even inside of an AVI file. So older software that uses Video For Windows can create those files.

ledoge 21 minutes ago | parent

FYI, both VP9 and AV1 support lossless as part of their base profiles, so lossless files using those codecs should be compatible with all implementations (at least in theory).

doublepg23 7 minutes ago | parent

What is the purpose of lossless H.264 vs. ProRes or the like?

Is it similar to lossless audio were there's not a ton of optimization you can do?

sacredcows 25 minutes ago | parent

This reminds me of that old nursery rhyme. Billy was a chemist's son, but Billy is no more, what he thought was H2O was H.264