That is what I have been saying for close to 10 years now. We are quite close to Patents free H.264 High Profile.
You will always have to provide H.264 as baseline due to compatibility. And that has a cost of storage. Bandwidth cost have been declining fast, and with AI Capex it doesn't seems to be slowing down either. Meanwhile Storage cost hasn't drop, if anything recent trend suggest it may have plateau and went up for HDD.
H.264 1080P 2Mbps is good enough for a lot of things. Just like how MPEG-2 is still getting encoder improvement ~30 years later so is H.264 encoder.
There are other codec like LCEVC which you can apply on top of H.264 can provide up to 60% bitrate reduction for 4K content. This saves on storage cost and provide enough benefits.
It is only in streaming services like Netflix where the catalog of video are low enough they could afford to re-encode it every 5- 8 months and storage cost is minimal.
Again a new codec introduction is easily a 10 years task. Higher Speed PON is already being tested, while others are working on NGS-PON2 roll out. 5G Home Broadband with Massive MIMO. The true free and open Video Codec may not be AV1 or AV2, but H.264.
The tech was surely locked down long ago if they're close to announcing, but just putting the dream out there that AV2 makes next-gen image compression more practical. AVIF's very effective at maintaining OK quality at low bitrates, but encoding at high quality on CPU (something like the common ~2bpp JPEG) was very slow. I think that slowed down adoption and was one of the reasons JXL still had a niche. Progressive mode would help for images too.
Another great thing JXL has is lossless recompression of .jpg files, which is a smaller improvement than a whole new format, but much easier to deploy. Saving 22% beats saving 0%. Harder, of course, to see how that one would connect to any of AOMedia's other priorities.
It would be great if AV1 was as ubiquitous as H.264. Apple is very much holding things back by insisting that Safari only support AV1 on devices with hardware decoding (M3 and higher), even though other browsers use software decoding just fine.
(Safari has a low market share but I have an above-average number of Mac / Safari users using my site)
In my experience, software decoding AV1 requires a lot more CPU utilization than the equivalent for H.264 (~90% on your average 1080p video). It would likely be a death sentence to support on older devices.
Totally different goal, but I wish there was a liberatory/non/less-encumbered form for realtime video production too.
A lot of good streaming hardware does jpeg-xs, ISO/IEC 21122, for real-time encoding basically from the camera to the mix station. It's still extremely high bit-rate mostly, but very low latencies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_XS
13 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 41.6 ms ] threadBut before it is widely used and accepted, here's AV2 for you to have compatibility issues with in the wild
With the ubiquity of h.264 and the patents expiring, will anyone but streamers care?
You will always have to provide H.264 as baseline due to compatibility. And that has a cost of storage. Bandwidth cost have been declining fast, and with AI Capex it doesn't seems to be slowing down either. Meanwhile Storage cost hasn't drop, if anything recent trend suggest it may have plateau and went up for HDD.
H.264 1080P 2Mbps is good enough for a lot of things. Just like how MPEG-2 is still getting encoder improvement ~30 years later so is H.264 encoder.
There are other codec like LCEVC which you can apply on top of H.264 can provide up to 60% bitrate reduction for 4K content. This saves on storage cost and provide enough benefits.
It is only in streaming services like Netflix where the catalog of video are low enough they could afford to re-encode it every 5- 8 months and storage cost is minimal.
Again a new codec introduction is easily a 10 years task. Higher Speed PON is already being tested, while others are working on NGS-PON2 roll out. 5G Home Broadband with Massive MIMO. The true free and open Video Codec may not be AV1 or AV2, but H.264.
Another great thing JXL has is lossless recompression of .jpg files, which is a smaller improvement than a whole new format, but much easier to deploy. Saving 22% beats saving 0%. Harder, of course, to see how that one would connect to any of AOMedia's other priorities.
(Safari has a low market share but I have an above-average number of Mac / Safari users using my site)
A lot of good streaming hardware does jpeg-xs, ISO/IEC 21122, for real-time encoding basically from the camera to the mix station. It's still extremely high bit-rate mostly, but very low latencies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_XS