Quote:
Originally Posted by AntiqueRefrigerator
so is the war about codecs changing from quality to cpu cycles? av1 seems to be barely better than hevc and takes 1000x longer. sure you can have more quality, but what about creation time? do we still care about that?
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No one cares about exhaustive search, which is where the orders of magnitude speed increases come for. Every tool has to get tested every way, so there's a combinatorial explosion.
The real metric is efficiency @ perf. If a new codec is able to deliver better quality in the same encoding time, that's a win. And as Moore's Law marches on, the number of MIPS/pixel we are willing to spend keeps going up up up.
x265 beats x264 for most scenarios with the same encoding time, AND it can provide much more efficient encoding for the patient.
Any new codec has to show that it can provide significant efficient gains in reasonable encoding time. And quality @ perf gets way better in the initial years after a new bitstream is defined as performance and psychovisual tuning gets done.
Increases in decoder complexity are a bigger barrier, since that goes to the cost of all those decoders in all those devices. If something takes 4x the silicon and milliwatts to decode versus an existing standard, it would have to be REALLY more efficient.
MPEG-2 -> H.264 -> HEVC were about 2x more complex per pixel, for about 2x better efficiency. Generally more complexity or lower efficiency gains don't really move the market (see MPEG-4 part 2, Theora, VP6-9)