Netflix Finds x265 20% More Efficient Than VP9 (streamingmedia.com) 178
Reader StreamingEagle writes (edited): Netflix conducted a large-scale study comparing x264, x265 and libvpx (Google-owned VP9), under real-world conditions, and found that x265 encodes used 35.4% to 53.3% fewer bits than x264, and between 21.8% fewer bits than libvpx, when measured with Netflix's advanced VMAF assessment tool. This was the first large-scale study to use real-world encoder implementations, and a large sample size of high quality, professional content.A Netflix spokesperson explained why they did the test in the first place; "We wanted to understand the current state of the x265 and libvpx codec implementations when used to generate non-realtime encodes optimized for OTT use case. It was important to see how the codecs performed when testing on a diverse set of premium content from our catalog. This test can help us find areas of improvement for the different codecs."
Mostly... (Score:3)
Re:Mostly... (Score:5, Insightful)
x265 is not very important except for 4K content and mobile phones
I think a 20% overall reduction in bandwidth for an in-demand and still-growing medium is *very* significant no matter what the resolution or device is.
Re:Mostly... (Score:5, Informative)
x265 is not very important except for 4K content and mobile phones
I think a 20% overall reduction in bandwidth for an in-demand and still-growing medium is *very* significant no matter what the resolution or device is.
The real number is 34-53%. The 20% is just over VP9. The 34-53% is over their current streaming codec.
Re:Mostly... (Score:5, Funny)
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not if you use the same bit rate.
Re:Mostly... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Mostly... (Score:4, Funny)
Yes but Capacitance Electronic Discs have a much warmer picture, especially when paired with new old-stock cathode ray tube amplifiers.
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But for best results, you need to run a green magic marker around the rim.
Seriously, if you want to compare to the vinyl wars, the real take-away is human beings like what ever they like, and it's possible to do something that's technically "better" that nevertheless has a negative subjective-impact... (myself, I couldn't care less if the "warm" sound I think I hear on vinyl is just surface noise effects-- if I like noisey better than clean, give me noisey).
One hopes that they've got this covered in th
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I'm surprised the various players don't have a "vinyl" mode; all you'd need to do is add some hiss and the occasional pop.
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They are comparing the bit rate of the streams at comparable image quality. They're not using MPEG2 now, that would be even less efficient than their current H.264 encoding.
One problem is that few computers and streaming boxes have H.265 hardware decoding support. That means that the decoding has to be done in software. (The latest generation of video cards DOES include H.265 decode support.) At best that means higher power consumption; at worse it means degraded playback because the CPU isn't up to the tas
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Re: Mostly... (Score:2)
How many people have a 10-bit display? For most people, their renderer will convert it back to 8-bit and lose more quality in the process. By all means use 10-bit and the BT.2020 colourspace if your source material uses this, but otherwise don't waste your time.
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The Joke
Your Head
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sssh...
They're having fun.
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If your encoder is more efficient when outputting 10 bpc data than 8 bpc data when given 8 bpc data as a source then your encoder is broken.
Hint: Your 10-bit mode using higher-precision internal calculations than the 8-bit mode is broken.
Anime people do this because it effectively acts like a low pass filter when you stretch your shit to 10 bits then encode at a bitrate low enough such that the 2 LSB get ignored 99% of the time. This works on traditional animation because of the reduced color palette and
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Vinyl, on the other hand is analogue and as such requires a stylus contact to read the grooves which will eventually wear out the media.
Not true, in the latter days of vinyl, they developed a laser stylus [diffuser.fm] now commercially available which doesn't touch the media
I was skeptical, assuming that this would largely negate the claimed advantage of analog vinyl over digital CDs, even with an absurd sampling rate, but following the link farm page to the real article [theiet.org] suggests otherwise:
One of its biggest appeals for audiophiles is the fact that its electronics are entirely analogue – the signal is not digitised as part of the signalling and playback process.
[...]
The LT player's five lasers – one on each channel to track the sides of the groove, one on each channel to pick up the sound (just below the tracking beams), and a fifth to track the surface of the record and keep the pickup at a constant height
Sounds fancy. Whether that's worth $20,000, well, YMMV.
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No, it's pretty much crap.
The records have to be absolutely 100% completely free of dust or any other particles, otherwise the laser will read them as if they were the actual groove, leading to a lot of unwanted noise. A normal pickup pushes aside most of the dust.
It's a neat idea, but it's much worse than a decent pickup on a normal turntable.
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The records have to be absolutely 100% completely free of dust or any other particles, otherwise the laser will read them as if they were the actual groove, leading to a lot of unwanted noise. A normal pickup pushes aside most of the dust.
It's a neat idea, but it's much worse than a decent pickup on a normal turntable.
Five lasers, but no vacuum to suck dust particles off the surface just before it passes under them?
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Also significant is CPU burden (Score:3)
I have noticed that x265 requires much more CPU for encoding AND decoding than x264. For example, my slightly aged laptop will not handle playing my 1080p x265 streams.
Re:Also significant is CPU burden (Score:4, Informative)
Incorrect (Score:2)
Instead we get a chunk of silicon that can't be used for anything except x265
That is not at all the case, for instance all of Apples advanced math libraries (under the umbrella "Accelerate") will make use of a GPU if one is present and faster than at the CPU. They handle things like linear algebra stuff (linpack) and all sorts of vector operations, including FFT...
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H.264 compression on the Mac can happen using Intel's QuickSync which is on the CPU. If you try and encode in a way that doesn't invoke QuickSync (for example, two pass encoding), it uses software compression on the CPU. QuickSync is very fast and a big improvement over what came before it.
http://macperformanceguide.com... [macperformanceguide.com]
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Instead we get a chunk of silicon that can't be used for anything except x265
That is not at all the case, for instance all of Apples advanced math libraries (under the umbrella "Accelerate") will make use of a GPU if one is present and faster than at the CPU. They handle things like linear algebra stuff (linpack) and all sorts of vector operations, including FFT...
This sounds very much like OpenCL or CUDA, or whatever the Applets call when you do general computing on GPU shaders. The video decoding bit is a different ASIC altogether.
That said, it would be nice to do more of these common operations like video decoding in GPGPU software instead of all these different bits for different purposes. I understand that some of the open-source GPU drivers already do some video decoding in the shaders, but that's about it. I guess something like ffmpeg/libva in OpenCL is to
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GPU video decoding support has been available for Linux for quite a long time now. That includes x265 too.
Some vendors are better than others of course, but even the worst sand baggers have finally managed Linux support.
Optimizing the software decoder like anything else will depend on motivation. Although the ffmpeg guys seem to be highly motivated and pretty much everyone depends on them (including Windows users).
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we get a chunk of silicon that can't be used for anything except x265, which I'm sure will have Windows drivers and be supported in Flash player, and maybe will get experimental Linux support 2 years after.
I watch H.265 videos with MPlayer on Linux, using an Nvidia GPU for the decoding. Admittedly, it's with the closed Nvidia drivers, but apparently the free drivers also handle the video decoder. It's dead easy since the VDPAU interface is fully open -- doing the same on Intel or AMD GPUs needs some extra work, and the results are not as nice. Of course, not all GPUs have the decoders in the first place.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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> Of course you did. Nearly all CPUs and GPU support accelerating x264, but not x265.
Even without GPU decoding, most CPUs have gotten powerful enough to decode h264 without any special help.
h264 just got OLD, much like mpeg2 did.
Now we have the new shiny shiny that's almost gauranteed to choke general purpose processors just like it's predecessors used to.
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x265 is not very important except for 4K content and mobile phones
I think a 20% overall reduction in bandwidth for an in-demand and still-growing medium is *very* significant no matter what the resolution or device is.
So is the cost (as in RTFA). HEVC or h.265 is not free. VP9 and x264 are.
Bandwidth and storage is a fixed quantity. A terabyte is a terabyte wherever you store it.
Processor speeds improve year over year.
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x264 isn't really free if you live or work anywhere that the patents on the underlying technologies are valid.
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The only thing preventing HEVC/H.265 from being supported natively in browsers is the patent license terms. The developers of x265 have made a proposal to fix this situation. See http://x265.org/proposal-accel... [x265.org]
The Edge browser does support H265 but surprise surprise it does not support many open formats. If you go to this site [html5test.com] and do an intercomparison between Chrome, Firefox, Edge and your preferred browser, with particular emphasis on the Video and Audio support you can see this.
BTW. That link was an interesting read although I don't think patents are really going to stop the home user from using the particular codecs. It is surprisingly easy using tools like Handbrake (it really does hammer your PC though)
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It is surprisingly easy using tools like Handbrake (it really does hammer your PC though) to convert from one codec to another as well as converting 8bit to 10bit or even 12bit. The main reason to convert H264 to H265 is the fact that you can get a reduction in file size from 55% to 65%
transcoding from one loss codec to another -> *facepalm 1*
8 bit source -> 10/12 bit destination *facepalm 2*
55-65% and in some cases much better than that -> *facepalm 3*
Sometimes, even Picard and Riker is not enough...
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If you care about storage space more than you care about quality, encoding to h265 is fine. Please use the cleanest source, though, unless you're a dumbass and you don't care about generational loss.
10-bit encoding of 8-bit sources is retarded. But it's a thing they do, however, especially the anime kiddos. It effectively acts a variable denoise filter which is useful when they're ripping from crunchyroll, OTA/cable/satellite, or even BluRay. 99% of the time the content gets quantized back the same (or
10 bit encoding (Score:3)
I offer it here so that someone can complain that I am karma whoring.
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Freudian slip on Line #71 [github.com] ?
Shouldn't that be: fan subs ? :-)
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You can issue reprimands about how it harms gay culture or whatever, but it only furthers their bemused fascination. Today, it's a casual sardonic remark on their own fringe cultur
HTML5 - Video (Score:5, Informative)
Speaking of which (HTML5 Video and Netflix):
The IETF has a working group to produce a new gen video codec "NetVC [wikipedia.org]" (Designed to be easy for wide adoptions, as the previous efforts of the IETF like Opus for audio).
The main candidate is by a group called "AOMedia [wikipedia.org]" (association for openmedia), working on AV1 (AOMedia's Video codec 1).
The association includes:
- Google (of Youtube fame) : They are using their current development as a base for AV1 (what would have become VP10 if there wasn't this whole NetVC story).
- Xiph (of Vorbis and Opus fame, with also contributions toward Flac, Speex, etc.) : They are developing a very interesting project called Daala, and they ended up also contributing the innovation done for Daala into AV1.
- Cisco : They gave what they have developed for their Thor codec also into AV1.
Netflix has also joined the AOMedia and they are investing resources into it.
Same with several browser makers (including Mozilla).
With all the people involved:
- you know there's some interesting performance coming (given the brains involved here, given past successes like Opus, and given the promising results of research projects like Daala).
- given that 2 top content providers like Google (Youtube) and Netflix are on board, there's a high chance of seeing deployment of the new codec.
- given that browser makers like Google (chrome), Mozilla, and Microsoft (Edge) are on board, there's a high chance of seeing browser support for the new codec.
- given that hardware chip maker like ARM, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, etc. are on board there's going to be hardware decoding support.
(Adobe is on board too, so browser support is guaranteed for the Widevine DRM plug-in required by Netflix' licensors. Not that it matters that much, because that part of HTML5 Video is already defined and deployed everywhere, except maybe with Firefox on Linux which is a bit delayed)
But you know that this looks promision,
and maybe same time next year, we'd be reading summaries along the lines of "Netflix and Google find AV1 20% more efficient than HEVC/H.265" "And also cheaper, royalty-free and widely supported"
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Adobe is on board too, so browser support is guaranteed for the Widevine DRM plug-in required by Netflix' licensors.
Google owns Widevine, not Adobe. Did you mean Primetime?
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> x265 is not very important except for 4K content and mobile phones.
This is exactly the mindset that leads to waste, inefficiency and bloat. If you can save even 5% on bandwidth, which is a limited resource, WHY NOT DO IT? And this is way more than 5%.
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The problem is it's the mindset and everyone seems to have it these days. "Oh, bandwidth isn't limited" "processors are more powerful" etc. You get a program built with 10 pieces of separate code that everyone failed to optimize and suddenly it's sucking 3x the bandwidth and 5x the processing power that it would have if everyone involved actually thought about optimization.
Where I work we go back and refactor a lot of our code and queries when we have opportunities to do so and in some cases it's horrify
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In my experience, good code not only runs much faster, but scales linearly, while bad code scales exponentially. All of those scrubs and their "micro benchmarks" showing that their code is fast enough, then you throw
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The problem is it's the mindset and everyone seems to have it these days. "Oh, bandwidth isn't limited" "processors are more powerful" etc. You get a program built with 10 pieces of separate code that everyone failed to optimize and suddenly it's sucking 3x the bandwidth and 5x the processing power that it would have if everyone involved actually thought about optimization.
Where I work we go back and refactor a lot of our code and queries when we have opportunities to do so and in some cases it's horrifying the waste that's been put up with. A SQL query that "works" but takes 30 seconds gets rewritten properly and now takes .3 seconds. Back when that was the only app on that server it ran faster so it was "no big deal" but now it saves hours of batch processing time per day. And this is EVERYWHERE. People wonder why their octa-core phones run barely faster than phones from 3 years ago? Shitloads of wasteful coding in those app design tools is my guess.
That SQL query that "works" was effective for the time. If the (then) future hadn't gone the way that it did, that 30 seconds may have continued to be completely acceptable. Judging code on CURRENT use case misses the point of skipping premature optimization (and using that time saved on something else) when it's not needed.
That said, there often comes a time when it's required. That's when you do the optimization. Which sounds like it's exactly what you've done.
Working as intended.
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If the (then) future hadn't gone the way that it did
If there is anything that I have learned is if something can go wrong it WILL go wrong. Don't let it go wrong in the first place. Spend the extra 1 second and think about your code before you vomit your crap code into production.
It isn't "premature optimization" until it makes it some degree harder to understand than the non-optimized version. Most of what people call "premature optimization" is really just writing correct code. Should I use String.EndsWith or String.Contains to find if a string has a ce
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Because h.265 requires hardware decoding to be even moderately watchable and the vast majority of devices that people currently own are not capable of decoding the latest h.265 videos. Netflix could force people to upgrade which would cause them to buy new decoding hardware and the waste you mention would shift from wasted b
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Converting is not free.
Neither is replacing all of the decoders out there that can't decode the new format yet. Some of these decoders may be embedded in devices that consumers have no intention of replacing.
Dumping a real standard on a whim is a bit of a bitch.
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If I want to do zero-latency live streaming to just a few endpoints outside the browser, I found that mpeg2video and aac streaming over UDP encodes and transmits with the least amount of lag. Near as I can tell,
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So why pay patent royalties on [...] when you don't have to?
Good question.
Signed,
DisplayPort vs. HDMI
What about VP10? (Score:2)
I thought VP10 was supposed to be the real competitor to HEVC.
Re:What about VP10? (Score:4, Informative)
However, Google decided to incorporate VP10 into AOMedia Video 1 (AV1). The AV1 codec will use elements of VP10 as well as the experimental formats Daala (Xiph/Mozilla) and Thor (Cisco).[72][73] Accordingly, Google has stated that they will not deploy VP10 internally or officially release it, making VP9 the last of the VPx-based codecs to be released by Google.[74]
Re:What about VP10? (Score:4, Informative)
Well that AV1 codec will have a much higher chance for success as more industry partners are involved, and it will get better hardware decoding support (both by the vendors, and by the codec itself being designed in a way with hardware decoding in mind). Netflix is part of AOM as well. The only bigger company of significance which is _not_ member of AOM is apple, who suprise suprise sits at the MPEG table and makes bucks with their H.265 patents.
Apple (Score:2)
The only bigger company of significance which is _not_ member of AOM is apple, who suprise suprise sits at the MPEG table and makes bucks with their H.265 patents.
Which also explain why they insist of using AAC for everything audio,
despite the tremendous success and performance of Opus - the previous similar success story of company collaboration (Xiph and Skype) to provide a standard to the IETF.
(Opus is currently used by Skype, WhatsApp, etc. - basically if it's on the web today, it probably uses Opus as an audio codec).
(I really wish IETF and AOMedia similar succes for their NetVC initiative/AV1 codec.
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Correct. It's the foundation for the new format, but will be enhanced further using Daala, Thor, and Opus.
Considering members of the new OpenAlliance consist of just about all browser manufactures (Microsoft, Google, Mozilla), chip manufacturers (Intel, AMD, ARM, Nvidia), and major content providers (Netflix, Amazon, Google), it's going to be widely supported/adopted quickly.
h.265 might have an advantage right now with the current iteration, VP9, but if the industry has put their weight behind this free Ope
What the hell is the VMAF assessment tool? (Score:5, Informative)
tl;dr - they took subjective test results from showing video samples to people, then used machine learning to develop an algorithm which produced similar results.
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"how can you compare it in a reproducible manner"
If you bother to look it up, you'll see exactly how this is done.
It's widely used and there are numerous automated benchmarking systems.
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And if you'd bothered to finish reading the post, you would see that he did look it up, and gave us a link, and a one-sentence summary.
Accusing someone for being lazy when you can't read four sentences may be a new low in internet history.
Is that all? (Score:2)
"The 20% is just over VP9."
So, basically, VP9 offers little to no advantage over 264, while even 265 is somewhat limited.
That strikes me as somewhat sad, considering all the verbiage wasted by Google on the licensing issue.
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Mathematics (Score:4, Interesting)
A small nitpick, but sad to see a common but serious maths error in a technical article.
20% fewer bits is not equivalent to 20% more efficient, but 25% more .
Efficiency would be the reciprocal of the bitrate. A ratio of 4:5 becomes 5:4 when looked at the other way around.
If you were to halve the bitrate, it would be twice as efficient, not 50% more.
Or to put it in simple money terms, its like if two items are $100, one gets a 20% discount to $80, the other is now 25% more expensive.
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Ratio comparisons make no sense on a scale with an arbitrary zero-point.
If you mean Kelvins, the universe has reached heat-death, so tomorrow will be the same.
VP9 Costs 100% Less (Score:2)
VP9 is free, as in beer. There's something to be said for that.
Or, do you want to keep sticking your head in nooses?
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Misleading Title (Score:2)
The title is misleading.
We sampled 5000 12-second clips from our catalog, covering a wide range of genres and signal characteristics. With 3 codecs, 2 configurations, 3 resolutions (480p, 720p and 1080p) and 8 quality levels per configuration-resolution pair
and then
x265 and libvpx demonstrate superior compression performance compared to x264, with bitrate savings reaching up to 50% especially at the higher resolutions. x265 outperforms libvpx for almost all resolutions and quality metrics, but the performance gap narrows (or even reverses) at 1080p.
So the highest resolution they tested was 1080p and performance between the 2 codecs was very close with libvpx beating out x265 in some cases. As far as bandwidth goes, saving at 1080p and above is more valuable than saving at 480p. Practically everything we watch at home is streamed 1080p. I don't see that x265 is the winner here. And where are the 4k tests?
Quality (Score:2)
Hey, that's great Netflix. Nice to see progress on the horizon in video encoding tech. Now would you please add an option to buffer the start of shows so they don't look like pixelated crap for the first 30 seconds or more on my HDTV? Maybe a checkbox somewhere? Even my wife notices, and she's not usually picky about these things. Thanks.
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That depends on the bitrate of the source video. For example, it would certainly be reasonable to compress h.264 video from a BluRay disc to h.265, since people already compress that to h.264 with what are generally considered to be acceptable results.
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"Why is it that as companies get bigger, they get less competent, despite having hired more of the competent people?"
Maybe it's the increased number of levels of management and the inherent increase in distance between any two levels of management.
Re:Another Google Project Not Worth The Hype (Score:5, Informative)
You realize we're comparing a FREE option vs a PAID option. As a business trying to save money here/there, I'd rather go with the free one to be honest.
Additionally, the title of this post is a bit misleading for what Netflix actually found. h.265 was better than VP9 in 4K content, but when it came down to 1080p and lower resolutions, VP9 did just as good or better than h.265. 1080p will STILL rule the streaming market for the foreseeable future, so VP9 is definitely relevant here.
Quote from Netflix on their blog regarding this:
Here’s a snapshot: x265 and libvpx demonstrate superior compression performance compared to x264, with bitrate savings reaching up to 50% especially at the higher resolutions. x265 outperforms libvpx for almost all resolutions and quality metrics, but the performance gap narrows (or even reverses) at 1080p.
http://techblog.netflix.com/20... [netflix.com]
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That's pretty shortsighted, even for a business. If you factor in the bandwidth costs of delivering 20% more data, using the paid CODEC might actually make better financial sense.
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H.265 may be paid, but if the bandwidth saved per annum by using H.265 saves more money than the cost of licensing, then you come out ahead.
Re: Another Google Project Not Worth The Hype (Score:2)
Also in 5 years everyone will have data caps whether we like it or not as their is too much money to be made. So this is important to us too.
Unless we live in these so called civilized counties that are not bought out that I hear about
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You realize we're comparing a FREE option vs a PAID option. As a business trying to save money here/there, I'd rather go with the free one to be honest.
Sounds like a sloppy way to try to save money. The smart thing would be to compare the cost of the paid option to the cost of the extra bandwidth needed for the less efficient free version, as well as any other problems the "free" version might cause. "Free" only saves money if when it's not causing you to incur greater costs elsewhere.
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Re:so what? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is not the case of video codecs.
Video is a huge bandwidth hog and small improvements can really make a difference. This is why we still use JPEG and MP3 but video benefits from the latest technologies. It is also why Vorbis (audio) is much more successful than Theora (video). Both are patent-free formats from xiph.org.
Additionally, with hardware improving, more advanced compression algorithms can be used. For example entropy coders are mostly a performance/ratio tradeoff and newer standards tend to use more advanced schemes. Not that these couldn't have been used before, but the hardware requirement were too steep at that time. And you can't really put "insert preferred encoding scheme here" in your standard to make it future proof, because it wouldn't be a standard. All parts have to work together. You don't want to specify a super duper filter that melts CPUs and botch the job with a crappy entropy coder, you have to balance each part to get the best of your target hardware.
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This is why we still use JPEG and MP3 but video benefits from the latest technologies.
They also remain because of the same reason ipv4 remains: noone wants to move first. There are better codecs for still images (webp) and for audio (AAC or opus), but nobody uses them as the original formats weren't available. Heck, its hard enough for us to get rid of gifs for animated images.
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It's also a tyranny of "good enough". Seriously when a 40mpxl image comes down as a 10MB JPEG and look identical to any better format it really doesn't make much of a difference. Doubly so that most images are not 40mpxl.
Video on the other hand is not yet good enough.
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..and sometimes the old stuff is actually better, eg: pre 2005 desktop interfaces vs post 2005..
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The incredibly arbitrary nature of your claim should be some indication that it is factually incorrect.
Audio codec (Vorbis, AAC, Opus) (Score:2)
It is also why Vorbis (audio) is much more successful than Theora (video). Both are patent-free formats from xiph.org.
That's 1 of the reason.
But other reasons are in play:
- Vorbis was released back at a time when music decoding was still an important task for low-power embed devices.
And MP3-hardware decoding cheap where available for cheap.
By the time most PDA/Smartphones/Tablet had enough power to decode audio on CPU without any difficulties, other better competitor were starting to appear: things like AAC (which are not free and patent encumbered).
Meaning Vorbis wasn't competitive anymore.
Vorbis still saw quite some use
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In my totally subjective and anecdotal experience the perceived quality of different mediums and resolutions goes like this:
4K Blu-ray > Upscaled HD Blu-Ray > 4K Netflix/Amazon streaming = Native resolution HD Blu-ray > Upscaled HD streaming > Native resolution HD streaming > Anything DVD
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Strangely enough your own comment supports the idea that Netflix is inferior to the original media.
If DVD represents the native resolution of the original, Netflix isn't going to be any better. Plus you won't have to worry about Netflix doing anything stupid with the original like cropping or zooming it.
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not a chance.. There's no way 720x480 has a shot at conveying the same information as HD, upscaled and edge sharpened or not..
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It all depends on how bad the "HD" encode is. Some of them can be quite horrible. It's quite easy to be stingy on the bitrate and end up with a disaster.
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This is true..
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This is still true:
"Quote from Netflix on their blog regarding this:
Here’s a snapshot: x265 and libvpx demonstrate superior compression performance compared to x264, with bitrate savings reaching up to 50% especially at the higher resolutions. x265 outperforms libvpx for almost all resolutions and quality metrics, but the performance gap narrows (or even reverses) at 1080p."
https://entertainment.slashdot... [slashdot.org]
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> Just count the bits. Done.
That is naive. Perception is *not* uniform, that is non-linear, and I'm not even talking about gamma correction.
Can you tell the difference in quality between:
* These 2 grays? 0xFFFFFF and 0xFEFEFE ?
* What about 0xFFFFFF and 0xFDFDFD
* Or between 0xFFFFFF and 0xFCFCFC
It is possible to encode these in the same number of bit but yet one will be more accurate then the other(s).
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VP9 and H264 have hardware decoders already. You only have to buy recent hardware :). Even H265 has, in the iphone 6.
As all graphics chip makers (Intel, AMD, nvidia) are sitting on the AV1 table, hardware support for it will be almost guaranteed.
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I've noticed this as well.
My HTPC struggles with 1080p encoded x.265 video, so I don't believe there is any real benefit to the consumers if we need to upgrade our equipment.
For the record, my HTPC has an AMD Athlon 5370 APU [cpubenchmark.net].
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2 of my home computers could not playback the video. H.265 requires quite a bit more CPU/GPU processing power for both encoding and decoding.
Your GPU probably has a hardware decoder for H.264, but not for H.265.
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