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That short video of the game on twitter is 11.5MB, or about 300x larger than the game itself.

X264 supports a lossless mode without chroma subsampling, which produces very good compression for raw emulator captures of retro game footage. It is much better than other codecs like HuffYuv, etc.

But for some reason, Firefox refuses to play back those kinds of files.

But for some reason, Firefox refuses to play back those kinds of files.

And that reason is because x264 is a free and open source implementation of the H.264 codec, and you still need to pay a license to use the patented technology regardless of how you do that. Using a free implementation of the code doesn't get you a free license for the codec.

Just in the US. Not in Europe. At least for decoding.

Haven't those patents expired by now?

Some have, but it depends on the profile used, and also on the country: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_M...

I'm not sure this is particularly telling. You can write a tiny program that generates a 4K image, and the image could be 1000x larger.

Or, if I write a short description "A couple walks hand-in-hand through a park at sunset. The wind rustles the orange leaves.", I don't think it would be surprising to anyone that an image or video of this would be relatively huge.

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