> However, eventually something new is going to come out…
The thing is, human eyes and ears aren’t getting any better and computing performance seems to be plateauing. My guess is we have already reached the “good enough” point and I doubt we’ll get formats 3-4X as efficient in the future.
My guess is that we'll ideally end up with something that isn't hard to use copyright/patent wise and offers "optimal" quality but at smaller file sizes when compared with the prior technologies, which would be a good thing for both storing your own video files, as well as when handling them en masse in most businesses. After all, if someone could reduce the bandwidth usage of their video hosting or streaming site by 10%, they'd be saving millions in hardware/networking expenses.
Though I don't think that we're at that point yet, many of these more recent technologies are not widely supported, or just not good enough.
For example, I rendered a ~6 minute 1080p video with Kdenlive with multiple codecs, to compare encode performance and resulting filesizes with the default settings:
Codec Time Filesize
H264 2:27 172 MB
VP8 9:34 244 MB
VP9 19:29 332 MB
AV1 FAIL FAIL
IMHO the most pressing issue I have with h264 is that it creates files that are almost always larger than HEVC (or AV1), and everything I own handles H265 without any issues (I think it's also mandated by some DVB standard).
I think you're getting downvotes for the sentiment, but I'm inclined to agree with both this comment, as well as the one you made a bit further in the thread.
> MP3 is also good enough. Modern compressors are on par with Opus, AAC or whatever is in fashion now. The format is sane, patents have expired, it run everywhere. It's not worth the trouble.
Something like Ogg/Vorbis would also be under my consideration for audio files, but I find these established and somewhat out of date technologies to be surprisingly stable and reliable. The same way how for many folks out there the H.264 video codec will also suffice for almost any use case (sadly Theora never got big). The same way how something like ZIP or 7z will be enough for most archiving needs.
I think there is no harm in using these options and not sweating about having to serve every asset in whichever of the modern formats the user's browser in question might support (nor should you chase perfect quality), as well as be sure to actually convert the assets into a multitude of formats and include them in the page, as long as 90% of your hosting costs aren't caused by this very choice. Who cares if a few pixels are a bit off because you saved your JPG with a quality setting of 75 or 80? As long as your application/site does what it should, that's hardly something that most people care about, or will even notice.
> We should focus on other more pressing issues. This one is basically solved.
However, eventually something new is going to come out AND get stable enough to have the same widespread adoption as the current stable and dependable options. Whether that happens in a year, 5 years or a decade, only time will show. I think that then will be the right time to switch to these new technologies for most people, as opposed to being early adopters.