Comment by azornathogron | Hacker News Reader

Comment by azornathogron | Hacker News Reader

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(I don't work in the industry, but am an interested amateur)

[Edit- I may have misunderstood your question, but I'll leave my reply anyway.]

Here are some possible reasons you might use Bink instead of a free codec:

- Bink video has been around for a long time as a product, even though the codec has been updated (probably multiple times, I don't know). There weren't always good-enough free codecs, and if you have prior experience integrating Bink with your stuff then you may prefer to stick to something you know is good even if it costs money.

- RAD focuses on producing libraries that are very easy to drop in, specifically in the context of games. They know how game code is written and structured. They know game developers want to be able to integrate video in a way that works -- and performs reliably -- within an existing game engine that does a lot of custom management of textures/buffers/graphics memory. State of the art free codecs don't necessarily have free libraries that are actually high performance and easy to integrate within a game context.

- Your state of the art free codec might work great on a modern smartphone or PC, but good luck getting it to work on a Nintendo Switch or whatever weird console you're targeting. Bink is available for whatever game-specific platform hardware you're targeting.

> Your state of the art free codec might work great on a modern smartphone or PC, but good luck getting it to work on a Nintendo Switch or whatever weird console you're targeting. Bink is available for whatever game-specific platform hardware you're targeting.

So basically this means something like Bink has limited application time wise, and going forward it will become more and more obsolete because free codecs will cover all needed use cases sufficiently.

Given that bink has been around for ages, it almost always finds a niche of decoding stuff fast for video games.

As a game you will always want more cycles for level loading or whatever else happens in background as you also play that video so bink-like specialized and super lean and fast library will always have a use in that scenario.

Gstreamer is a pain to set up, and when you do set it up it uses tons of threads, ffmpeg isn't nicer either.

> Given that bink has been around for ages, it almost always finds a niche of decoding stuff fast for video games.

Well, that's exactly the point. It's been around for dark ages. Today things are different.

For new codecs like AV1 there are new and efficient decoders too and they are only getting better. It's not all limited to ffmpeg which is using external decoders anyway, it doesn't decode things itself.

As I said, in games there's always a need for fast, platform agnostic (and super low overhead API that just works). And I mean truly platform agnostic, PS4, PS5, Switch, etc. Those are new platforms that may or may not have ports of whatever else is "available" and "fast".

Bink fits the bill today and has fit the bill since forever. I don't see any of the alternatives having similar performance characteristics, ease of integration or availability on platforms that are more or less closed and there's no indication of them being open in the future.

In adition to that the switch cost is quite high so any other alternative has to be good, and I haven't yet seen a contender.

Consoles held progress back for decades, but even they can't stop it. So I see Bink becoming obsolete, I don't really see any major arguments for it. Just because it fit the bill before doesn't say anything about the future.

Yeah, those Switch sales are tanking, while PS 5 and XBox X/S pile unsold on the store shelves.

Ah, you mean that 1% market share on Steam, sorry.

Not sure about Switch, but recent AMD based consoles should have good video decoding capabilities. You can do fine without Bink there.

So instead of trolling again, analyze where it's heading. I don't see any reason why Bink can't be replaced by free codecs.

Because what matters is what comes on the SDK and AAA game engines, regardless of what AMD supports.

I can call Epic, Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Apple, Google when something doesn't work as expected, free codecs dumped on github, who knows.

:D It's heading towards what you predict at the speed we're heading to be in the year of linux on desktop.

PS4/XB1 have been enormously more powerful than PS3/Xb360 and yet almost all games on those consoles that play a video do it using Bink even if both consoles have that AMD hardware you mention.

The current generation PS5, etc is way more powerful than PS4, and yet bink still seems to still dominate in the limited titles that we can see.

That's not a technical problem, sounds like incumbent problem to me. And this also negates your argument that Bink is needed because hardware can't support other codecs. Apparently it's powerful and it can? So why even bring that as a reason.

The "we can use worse software now that hardware allows us to do it" is why software is sunk so low these days.

We use Bink because it is better then the open-source alternatives, and that's it.

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