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Comment by pacificat0r | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

: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.

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.

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