H.264 Is Magic (2016)

Posted by ea016 2 hours ago

Comments

Comment by Dwedit 37 minutes ago

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.

Comment by doublepg23 15 minutes ago

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?

Comment by freeone3000 11 minutes ago

Lots of hardware requires specifically h.264 as a transit; many of the MPEG standards are built around it. So this lets you get MPEG-PS, or lossless BDs, or some hardware/specialized software decoders for machines that otherwise couldn’t keep up (like set top boxes).

Comment by ledoge 29 minutes ago

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).

Comment by pwython 1 hour ago

Ten years later, 2026 magic: AV1

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

And soon AV2

https://av2.aomedia.org/

Comment by qmr 50 minutes ago

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.

Comment by kccqzy 38 minutes ago

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.

Comment by HumblyTossed 1 hour ago

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

Comment by Dylan16807 1 hour ago

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

Comment by alt227 1 hour ago

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

Comment by judge2020 1 hour ago

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-...

Comment by sanfus_grimmer 1 hour ago

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.

Comment by fishgoesblub 1 hour ago

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

Comment by croes 21 minutes ago

My $100 NUC has AV1 hardware decoder support.

Maybe a device from 2019 is a bad data point

Comment by duped 1 hour ago

Niche luxury products aren't exactly mainstream either

Comment by MadameMinty 1 hour ago

av1_nvenc exists therefore it's mainstream :)

Comment by Firerouge 1 hour ago

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

Comment by pxoe 1 hour ago

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.

Comment by cubefox 27 minutes ago

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%.

Comment by echelon 1 hour ago

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.

Comment by cowlevel 48 minutes ago

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

Comment by cubefox 24 minutes ago

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.

Comment by shevy-java 1 hour ago

We need one final video codec.

Otherwise we will have this:

https://xkcd.com/927/

Comment by Dylan16807 1 hour ago

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.

Comment by aktenlage 1 hour 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.

Comment by Hasz 1 hour ago

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

Comment by augment_me 1 hour ago

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.

Comment by kouru225 34 minutes ago

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

Comment by MadameMinty 1 hour ago

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.

Comment by ashleyn 1 hour ago

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.

Comment by MadameMinty 1 hour ago

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.

Comment by Dwedit 46 minutes ago

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.

Comment by cubefox 18 minutes ago

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.

Comment by F3nd0 50 minutes ago

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).

Comment by MadameMinty 1 hour ago

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

Comment by HelloUsername 1 hour ago

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

Comment by amelius 9 minutes ago

I wonder if an AI can make a better codec, and if we would think of it as "magic".

Comment by ksec 53 minutes ago

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...

Comment by tvelichkov 1 hour ago

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.

Comment by jruohonen 29 minutes ago

Ref.:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38099633

Comment by 58 minutes ago

Comment by Dwedit 52 minutes ago

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

Comment by kouru225 31 minutes ago

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

Comment by dzdt 1 hour ago

Article is dated (2016).

Comment by lirolero 1 hour ago

[dead]

Comment by whall6 1 hour ago

Socrates was certainly a pioneer of conveying information efficiently

Comment by rishabhd 1 hour ago

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

Comment by sacredcows 34 minutes ago

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

Comment by shevy-java 1 hour ago

The only question I have:

Should I use H.264 or H.265?

Comment by F3nd0 45 minutes ago

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.

Comment by qingcharles 1 hour ago

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.

Comment by quibono 1 hour ago

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).

Comment by qmr 46 minutes ago

That all depends on your use case.

How are you generating video?

How are you playing it back?

Comment by alt227 1 hour ago

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

Comment by phi_node_48 1 hour ago

[flagged]

Comment by WhitneyLand 1 hour ago

"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.

Comment by nomel 1 hour ago

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.

Comment by WhitneyLand 3 minutes ago

I don’t think they are confused either just don’t think it’s a good way to introduce the point.

When good expositors choose motivating questions, say like 3 blue 1 brown, they don’t usually make apples to oranges comparisons. The best examples motivate while making sense before and after you learn.

Comment by rob74 1 hour ago

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.

Comment by Dylan16807 1 hour ago

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.