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Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

I am thinking if H.264 AVC will be like Jpeg, where the worse is actually better. They are ubiquitous, and hardware decode in visually all Smartphone, and seems to be good enough for a lot of cases (non-4K usage).

But it is still nice to see AV1 coming along, especially coming from VLC (dav1d) and Xiph ( rav1e ) .

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I believe the compression benefits of AV1 to H.264 are greater than Jpeg to newer versions of image compression. Also, when you're talking about video, the sizes of files are magnitudes greater than images. I believe as long as we achieve backwards compatibility and easy conversion of video files, AV1 will be the future.

It depends on the target bitrate, but from what I've seen at high quality, the difference between HEIF and JPEG is comparable to the difference between H.265 and H.264.

I think your second point is more important though. There are basically two main cases for images. On the one hand, you have images which are an input to some process, like editing or publishing, where people are unwilling to sacrifice any information, lest the errors accumulate. On the other hand, you have images intended for final consumption. By modern standards, those images are already so small that saving 50% isn't usually worth either losing compatibility, or putting in extra effort to offer a fallback.

There are some in between niches of course. Apple has bet on one in iOS with phone photography. That makes sense because many people will have a large volume of images, but they're not professional photographers who need perfect fidelity. I don't know if that's actually worthwhile to most users, though, since they too have to deal with the compatibility issue.

iOS still exports in jpeg unless it knows for sure the receiver (another Mac or iOS device with the right version) supports heic, or you change a setting to force it to always export heic. So users should rarely run into the compatibility issue.

Agreed, but I'm very curious which codec (h265 or av1) will eventually "win" in the 4K+ and HDR space.

Perhaps AV1 will in the loooong term, but as of today h265 is what every 4K Blu-Ray uses and just about every modern device has a hardware decoder. So that’s gotta count for something.

H.265 is a much worse patent minefield than h.264 ever was: the h.265 patents are owned by different patent pools with different licensing terms, some of which even without revenue cap.

The only way to relatively safely produce h.265 content is to be one of these companies in one of the patent pools.

AV1 in contrast is supposed to be free of patents and open for everybody to use. Of course there could still be some patent being violated and there's no legal entity to fight for you if you get sued, but given the mess around h.265, this might still be the better option.

AV1 is backed by multiple soft- and hardware manufacturers, so between that, the free licensing, and the legal murkiness of h.265, this might yet take off.

I certainly hope so. It would be the first time in decades that the best media codec is also patent free and useable by everybody.

>AV1 in contrast is supposed to be free of patents

It is not, it never was, and never will be. It is only Royalty Free.

"free of patents" is like atomic hydrogen; a very short lived state in practice.

Ummm...kinda the opposite? The terminal value is always "patent free" :-)

My guess would be AV1, on the other hand this is really the space h265 occupies at the moment so maybe they will be effective at holding on to it.

I fully expect AV1 to become the new 'de facto' video format on the web which is the crown h264 has held for ages. No royalties, better compression and wide hardware support coming will make it a very attractive choice.

And as streaming will also move towards 4k+, given that all the streaming giants (Google, Netflix, Amazon) are directly backing the development of AV1 it would surprise me if they did not phase out HEVC in favour of AV1 for all their 4K+ needs as well (Youtube doesn't support HEVC at all).

I still consume nearly all of my content in 720p. The bandwidth requirements usually outstrip my need for fidelity. This is especially true when traveling when I don’t have access to my own broadband. It’s easy to get stuck in a place with slow internet services.

I don't think h265 will ever be widespread as h264. I am counting on H266, which has an industry formed alliance MC-IF for patents and they include All most of the original H.263, H.264, H.265 members. ( Missing Qualcomm )

Hopefully they will work out a deal and move things forward.

But 4K is kinda ready. Majority of YouTubers switched to it already, some years ago.

Personally I find 1080p not enough nowadays.

The problem is 4K are streamed in much higher bitrate, making the video looks better. But in reality, if 1080P had the same bitrate you might not be able to tell the difference. Standard Youtube using VP9 stream 4K at nearly 20Mbps. Most of the best encoded BluRay torrent aren't even using this bitrate, and they are still using x264.

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