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Comment by olowe | Hacker News Reader

It’s more money and more user’s compute being thrown at the problem to get the streaming service’s CDN bill down.

While funny, that's not really what I would call accurate. Users get reduced data consumption, potentially higher quality selection if the bandwidth now allows for a higher resolution to be streamed, and possibly lower disk usage should they decide to offline the videos.

Better codecs are an overall win for everyone involved.

> Users get reduced data consumption, potentially higher quality selection if the bandwidth now allows for a higher resolution to be streamed

They also get increased power usage, lesser battery life, higher energy bills, and potentially earlier device failures.

> Better codecs are an overall win for everyone involved.

Right.

If you experience early failure your device is badly engineered.

Mobile/power constrained devices don't use software decoding, that just a path to miserable experience. Hardware decoding is basically required.

Meanwhile my desktop can SW decode 4k youtube with 3% reported cpu usage.

Not to mention making your device obsolete. My 12 year old laptop already can't decode some of the videos on Pirate Bay in real time, because the codec is too demanding.

Of course, we’re living in the future where Moore’s law has seriously slowed down. But, as a product of the 90’s this is a kind wild thing to see. I can’t imagine in the year 2000 being disappointed content wouldn’t play on a 386 or something.

But, I mean, your expectation is not that unreasonable, computers were quite good by 2013. It is just an eye-opening framing.

> power usage, lesser battery life, higher energy bills

I like how you padded this list by repeating the same thing thrice. Like, increased power usage is obviously going to lead to higher energy bills.

And it’s especially weird because it’s not true? The current SOTA codec AV1 is at a sweet spot for both compression and energy demand (https://arxiv.org/html/2402.09001v1). Consumers are not worse off!

> Better codecs are an overall win for everyone involved.

I don’t remember ever watching a movie and wishing for a better codec, in the last 10 years

I do because the quality of av1 on youtube is often significantly better than vp9 and especially h264, even though the filesize is usually lower than both. And the quality of the video at 1080p when only the worse formats are available is noticeably bad.

I can send you some of my DVDs that look like trash now. Of course, that's less of a codec problem and more of a bandwidth/encoder/mastering problem; plenty of DVDs look fine (if a little undetailed) on a larger screen.

I do wish ATSC1 would adopt a newer codec (and maybe they will), most of the broadcasters cram too many subchannels in their 20mbps and a better codec would help for a while. ATSC3 has a better video codec and more efficient physical encoding, but it also DRM and a new proprietary audio codec, so it's not helpful for me.

How is that relevant to anything?

Modern video codecs are what broke the telco monopoly on content and gave us streaming services in the first place. If the cdn bill is make or break, the service isn’t going to last.

And there’s no transfer of effort to the user. Compute complexity of video codecs is asymmetric. The decode is several order of magnitude cheaper to compute than the encode. And in every case, the principal barrier to codec adoption has been hardware acceleration. Pretty much every device on earth has a hardware-accelerated h264 decoder.

For those of us who back up media, this can be very appealing as well. I don’t disagree that what you said is a major driving force, but better formats have benefited me and my storage requirements multiple times in the past.

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