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Comment by Uberzi | Hacker News Reader

Honest question. In which scenario do you care so much about the size of the DLL , these days ?

Well I'm looking for the same thing, for a lightweight 2D game engine supporting decades old hardware (the game player is 2MB zipped, 1MB for a minimised build). Animations are likely to be low resolution and seconds long, so a huge decoding library would be pointless. Sure, most users don't care about file sizes, but some (including me) still do. Especially for the wasm and Win95 ports.

I considered libtheora, the library size is good but the compression/visual quality is awful compared to the alternatives.

Does that hardware have the CPU power for a recent video codec? It doesn't sound like it.

Same use-case, we used to rely on system libraries but the video codec support is all over the place on each platform, and developers would test in their main platform and ship to others without fully testing and have a broken video near the end of their games because WMV runs on Windows but not on macOS, or the audio of the video was a variant of AAC that didn't run in the web port in some places and a bunch of other random differences between platforms to the point the only reliable way was to cut system video libraries and make sure all platforms have the exact same codecd. But then it turns out there isn't something better than Theora or mpg-1 without making the game player have 10x or more in size - the game player is around 3MB unzipped.

Maybe to encode/decode video on a Mars rover.

Your primary concern is almost certainly power draw, so you're using a hardware encoder. The weight of a few more megabytes ROM would be inconsequential.

I mean the Ingenuity helicopter runs Linux, which seems to suggest that a few megabytes here and there isn't such a big deal; whatever the constraints of mars are, they seem to have a fair amount of onboard storage. I can't imagine that the improved video compression of AV1 compared to Theora or H.264 wouldn't outweigh the cost of that 4MB extra storage space.

That hardware selection was locked-in years ago, I think that's the major hold up with ginny in particular. I don't think even the next helicopter they're building now will be able to get hardware AV1 encoding. Would be moderately funny if they could eek better performance out of ffmpeg with remote updates.

Just FWIW...

* eke out -- extend something by stretching it or using less.

* eek -- a noise of surprise or fear, stereotypically used upon seeing mice.

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/eke--out

Embedded would be my guess.

an embedded machine that 1. has a software decoder, 2. has presumably some ram for that decode and 3. cant afford like 128megs flash on its design for its rom?

Embedded machine with big enough CPU for video encoding, but not having 10-20 MB flash? Doesn't sound too plausible.

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