H.264 Is Magic (2016)

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

H.264’s “sweet spot” and longevity

  • Many consider H.264 a great balance of compression efficiency, complexity, and mental comprehensibility compared to newer codecs.
  • Extremely mature tooling (e.g., x264 with rich presets and tunings) reinforces its position.
  • Widely supported hardware and software, plus impending patent expirations (~2027–2030, with some disagreement), suggest it will remain a baseline codec for a long time.
  • Some argue its guaranteed patent-free future could entrench it further, despite slightly worse efficiency than newer codecs.

H.265/HEVC: better compression, messy ecosystem

  • H.265 typically yields 20–50% smaller files than H.264 at similar perceived quality, especially at 4K/HDR and low bitrates.
  • Complaints: heavy computational cost for encoding, and rough hardware/driver support in some environments.
  • Strong criticism of fragmented, opaque patent pools and licensing (multiple pools, some covering content distribution, plus extra licensors).
  • Despite this, it’s widespread in cameras, phones, 4K Blu-ray, premium streaming, and much of modern 4K piracy.
  • Some report HEVC encoders (including x265 with “tune grain”) still underperform for film grain compared to well-tuned x264.

AV1, VVC, and other new codecs

  • AV1 is praised for royalty-free licensing and high efficiency; used increasingly by YouTube, Meta, and some conferencing tools.
  • Concerns: very high software encode cost (though faster encoders like SVT-AV1 are cited as competitive with x264/x265 at comparable quality).
  • VVC (H.266) is said to be a generational step beyond AV1 in compression, but expected to suffer HEVC-like patent/royalty issues; already deployed in some regions.
  • MPEG-5 EVC Baseline is mentioned as “H.264 refined” with similar complexity but better compression, though it has not gained traction.

Encoding practice: speed, quality, and hardware

  • Multiple users note GPU hardware encoders trade quality for speed, lacking deep analysis and psychovisual tricks of CPU encoders.
  • For archiving and high-quality rips, people often prefer slow software encoding (H.264 or HEVC) with constant-quality settings; for live or low-value content, hardware or faster modes are acceptable.
  • AV1 and HEVC are seen as too heavy for some live/low-latency scenarios on typical hardware.

Other technical and side discussions

  • Debate over “information entropy” terminology versus “Shannon entropy,” and over whether PNG can be considered “lossy” when preceded by color quantization.
  • Several anecdotes describe early MPEG work, failed proprietary “revolutionary” codecs, and the historical shift from “video-on-demand” to “streaming.”
  • Some perceive YouTube’s 720p quality as having degraded over time due to more aggressive bitrate constraints, despite better codecs.