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Comment by occz | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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?

> 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!

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