Re:An Invisible Tax on the Web: Video Codecs (2018)
by everyone on Saturday January 09, 2021 @11:13PM
(#25709855)
Wow that article was a real eye opener..
It has always pissed me off that popular proprietary / walled garden type platforms like xbox, playstation, smartTVs, smartphones etc. cant play HEVC.
Since they are so popular it means that the most popular and most heavily seeded torrents of films and tv are always crappy x264 encoded.. so 5 or 6 GB for a 1080p movie instead of a nice lean 1GB HEVC file.
I used to think it was simply because those platforms are computers but crippled ie. you cant install codecs (or VLC for example) on them, you can only install whatever is available via the walled garden store.
But now I know that HEVC support is expensive so Sony, MS etc really dont want to support it.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:An Invisible Tax on the Web: Video Codecs (2018)
by NavinF on Sunday January 10, 2021 @12:45AM
(#25710917)
> 5 or 6 GB for a 1080p movie instead of a nice lean 1GB HEVC file
Woah there, HEVC and VP9 are not that good. Both are 25-30% better than h264. See Netflix's benchmarks. We're talking 4gb vs 6gb
A 1gb movie will always look like crap, even with an even better codec like AV1. Pause the movie during an action sequence or explosion and it'll look like you're watching the video on YouTube with all the compression artifacts that entails.
Re:An Invisible Tax on the Web: Video Codecs (2018)
by BlueTemplar on Sunday January 10, 2021 @01:21PM
(#25717683)
Well, the point about lossy video compression is that you aren't supposed to pause the video…
Re:An Invisible Tax on the Web: Video Codecs (2018)
by videoborat on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @09:58AM
(#25747706)
I think it's important to understand that google wont even let you use any HEVC decoder thats already installed in your OS to decode video in their walled-garden browser. They just deliberately block this technology.
Re:An Invisible Tax on the Web: Video Codecs (2018)
by samoa42 on Sunday January 10, 2021 @08:33AM
(#25714491)
maybe growing up with PAL is hampering my expectations here, but imo 1GB/hour in h264 looks just fine whereas same size HEVEC, while having supperior contrast and sharpness, almost always has fucked up colors so i try to avoid it. also HVEC makes my fans spin up.