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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

h.264 is from the 90s, so of course it's fast after ~30 years of use. hell, when I first got into encoding, we had dedicated expansion cards to do MPEG-1/MPEG-2 encoding because it was so difficult at the time. New codecs always take time in the beginning while the encoding software is tweaked/optimized. Eventually, it becomes part of the CPU hardware and then we all make comments like "remember when ____ was so slow?" one day, you'll regale the young whiper snappers on internet forums about how painfully slow AV1 encodes were when they start complaining how newHotnessEncoder5000 is so slow.

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Oh definitely, no argument here, I'm 100% ok with AV1 becoming the standard "video codec to rule them all", but I'm saying that in the short term, it's difficult to recommend AV1 or VP9 over h264 (at least for personal use). H264 encodes 10x faster, still gives reasonably decent compression, is supported by basically every consumer device [1] and browser out of the box, and very soon will have all the patents for it expired meaning that it will be truly royalty-free. x264 in particular is extremely nice in my experience, doing a lot to really squeeze out a lot of quality in a relatively small amount of space.

That said, AV1 is very obviously the future, and I'm perfectly happy with it taking over the market from h264, and I think that due to the bandwidth savings it's only a matter of time before all the major video services make it the default, especially as the speed of encoders increases to a useable level, which I'm sure it will soon enough.

[1] I know the most recent Raspberry Pi doesn't have a decoder chip for h264, but I think it's fast enough to do it in software.

Raspberry Pi have had hardware decoder for h264 for as long as they've existed (I think?), but dropped in the most recent version. I don't understand why.

They've recently contributed non-trivial patches to Firefox to use the embedded Linux API for video hardware acceleration (V4L2, vs. VAAPI on desktop that we also support), and are shipping the h264ify extension with their Firefox build to get that codec often for their users so that the experience is good on older devices.

Maybe the 5 is that much faster than it's not needed as much, but h264 represent so much content that it feels a bit surprising anyways.

But I'm just a software person, hardware is complicated differently.

> h.264 is from the 90s, so of course its fast after ~30 years of use.

If only! Then the patents would have expired. But H.264 is newer than MPEG-4 Part 2.

But you're right: H.264 has had the advantage of time, to gain fast hardware support.

Ok. You are allowed to think that but stop forcing AV1 down my throat, because you think CPUs will be both cheap and fast in the far away future, because as far I am aware, I exist in the present moment until that future arrives.

>h.264 is from the 90s

I am pretty sure you are thinking of H.263 if it was from the 90s. H.264 barely started in the 00s.

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