Hacker News

points by shevy-java 11 hours ago | 0 comments

We need one final video codec.

Otherwise we will have this:

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.

Edit: And you can also look at the video codec landscape as having two major standards that put out new versions sometimes. The MPEG/h.26x series and the VPx/AVx series. It's not quite that simple but it's close.

[–] aktenlage 11 hours ago

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.

[–] taneq 8 hours ago

I don’t think we’re far off a “final” video codec, in the sense that jpg and mp3 and zip are effectively “final” image and sound and data codecs. Sure, there are newer codecs with higher compression foot a given quality level, but at some point it’s good enough to not bother upgrading, especially when the new version costs exponentially more for negligible gain.

…maybe THIS one will be The Final Codec… doodoodoo dooo

[–] ChadNauseam 3 hours ago

> jpg and mp3 and zip are effectively “final” image and sound and data codecs

In popular consciousness, maybe. When people think image they thing jpg. But most websites you use aren't delivering images as jpg. Most sites care about saving money on bandwidth and their site loading fast, and because of that they tend to use webp and avif, which are much smaller for the same quality.

[–] thunderfork 4 hours ago

Re: mp3, Opus is a pretty big improvement. In my experience I've found that Opus is pretty reliably transparent at 96kbit/s, whereas LAME (which really squeezes mp3 for all it's got) needs ~130kbit/s

I think encode costs are higher (although I'm struggling to find any actual data) but in my experience this is totally negligible in practice.

Of course, don't go converting all your mp3s to Opus, but if you're running a music streaming server or whatever, Opus is pretty sweet... and probably close to "as good as it gets" until/unless we figure out some crazy new tricks.