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H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)

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Re: H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)

#331
post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How much are we looking at for 1080p, 10%? We don't know yet. There are no public technical details (that I know of) for H266 yet, but if I recall H265 gave the same 50% reduction in bandwidth claims, and for years people stuck with H264, because it was higher quality due to dropping off less subtle parts of the video you really want to see. Only in the last couple of years has H265 really started to become embraced…

H.265 was always better from a technical perspective but that's not everything which factors into a video codec decision. H.264 was supported everywhere, including hardware support on most platforms. You could generate one file and have it work with great experience everywhere, whereas switching to anything else likely required adding additional tools to your workflow and trying to balance bandwidth savings against b…

> H.264 was supported everywhere

this. our TV (a few years old, "smart") can play videos from a network drive, but doesn't support H.265. reencoding a season's worth of episodes to H.264 takes a while...

Re: H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)

#332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 720p or 1080p is fantastic video resolution, especially on a mobile phone. 720p is far from fantastic. It's noticeably blurry, even on mobile. 1080p is minimally acceptable, and is now over 10 years old. > Less than 1% of the population cares or wants higher resolution. That's a very bold claim. Have any studies or polls to back that up?

> That's a very bold claim. Have any studies or polls to back that up? From 1: > In Japan, only 14 percent of households will own a 4K TV in 2019 because most households already have relatively new TVs, IHS said. Let's dissect the reasoning. Most households already have a relatively new TV, thus a low adoption rate. Implying that needing a new TV generally, not the desire to upgrade resolution, is the primary motivat…

Your first link includes an extra detail which is important:

> In addition, “with the Japanese consumer preference for smaller TV screens, it will be more difficult for 4K TV to expand its household penetration in the country"

With a smaller TV screen, yeah, you don't need 4K.

But in the USA, larger screens are desirable. And that's seen in the expected 34% 4K adoption rate in the USA your article describes.

I still use a 1080p TV, but it's also only 46" and is 10 years old. I'll probably be buying a 4K 70-75" OLED later this year.

My computer monitor is 1440p. I could have bought 4K when I upgraded, but I'm primarily a gamer and I wanted 144 hz, and 4K 144 hz monitors didn't exist yet.

Re: H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)

#333
post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really want to try to get individual licenses from every single person who worked on video codecs from in the last 20 years so you can legally compress video?

While that would be somewhat harder, I bet most engineers are much less greedy than companies that employ them.

I see you are unfamiliar with the Wright brothers patent war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war

Re: H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)

#334

My 2012 Mac Mini has quickly become much less useful since YouTube switched from H.264 (AVC) to VP9 for videos larger than 1080p a couple of years ago (Apple devices have hardware decoders). I've tested 4K h.264 videos and they play wonderfully thanks to the hardware. My internet connection speeds and hard drive space have increased much faster than my CPU speeds (internet being basically a free upgrade). So I don't…

Honestly, the expectation that a 2012 computer will play 4K video seems a little unreasonable, no? 4K video virtually didn't even exist back then. I'm actually amazed it even handles it in h.264. This isn't about saving companies a few cents on bandwidth. It's about halving internet traffic, about doubling the number of videos you can store on your phone. That's pretty huge. You can still get h.264 video in 1080p on…

It's not so much about it being able to handle 4K, but Youtube already has too low of a bitrate for 1080p (resulting in MPEG artifacts, color banding, etc). So I like to watch in 2.7K or 4K downsampled, since at least I get a higher bitrate.

The bigger problem that I didn't mention is with videoconferencing: FaceTime is hardware accelerated and has no issues with 720p, but anything WebRTC seems to prefer VP8 or VP9 codecs, which fails on my Mini and strains my 2015 MBP. Feels like a waste of perfectly good hardware to me.

Re: H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)

#335
post #266

My 2012 Mac Mini has quickly become much less useful since YouTube switched from H.264 (AVC) to VP9 for videos larger than 1080p a couple of years ago (Apple devices have hardware decoders). I've tested 4K h.264 videos and they play wonderfully thanks to the hardware. My internet connection speeds and hard drive space have increased much faster than my CPU speeds (internet being basically a free upgrade). So I don't…

Your 2012 Mac Mini's video output doesn't go higher than 2560x1600 anyway, so just staying at 1080p doesn't seem like a huge sacrifice.

True. I just addressed this in a reply above this one as well: Youtube already has too low of a bitrate for 1080p (resulting in MPEG artifacts, color banding, etc). So I like to watch in 2.7K or 4K downsampled, since at least I get a higher bitrate.

Can't do that anymore without either buying a new computer or youtube-dl and recompress the bigger version (which takes hours for minutes of video on my poor machine).

Re: H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)

#336

My 2012 Mac Mini has quickly become much less useful since YouTube switched from H.264 (AVC) to VP9 for videos larger than 1080p a couple of years ago (Apple devices have hardware decoders). I've tested 4K h.264 videos and they play wonderfully thanks to the hardware. My internet connection speeds and hard drive space have increased much faster than my CPU speeds (internet being basically a free upgrade). So I don't…

Maybe you can force the YouTube web app to use the H.264 version? https://github.com/erkserkserks/h264ify Or is there no longer an H.264 4k version?

I have that installed and it works really well! But H.264 only goes up to 1080p on YouTube as of a couple of years ago. As mentioned in other comments, I prefer 2.7K or 4K and downsample to get higher bitrate, but this isn't possible without downloading and converting. (I only do that for the rare video where I really want the best quality; most of the time I tolerate the YouTube 1080p with h264ify).

Re: H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)

#337
post #252

My 2012 Mac Mini has quickly become much less useful since YouTube switched from H.264 (AVC) to VP9 for videos larger than 1080p a couple of years ago (Apple devices have hardware decoders). I've tested 4K h.264 videos and they play wonderfully thanks to the hardware. My internet connection speeds and hard drive space have increased much faster than my CPU speeds (internet being basically a free upgrade). So I don't…

>So I don't appreciate new codecs coming out and obsoleting my hardware You could say something similar about any other technological advance.

100%, I was worried I'd seem like an old 35-year-old man when I posted my comment. And it's true, I upgrade my hardware much less frequently than I did when I was younger.

I don't mind replacing a machine after 8 years of service, but h.265 still isn't supported by Google/YouTube, and Apple refuses to add hardware decoding for VP8/VP9, so there's no universal codec that will work as efficiently as h.264 did on my Mini and multitude of MacBooks and iPhones all this time.

Re: H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)

#339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I read the release was that it's not a lossless compression, it reads like it's downscaling 4k+ video to a lower format with 'no perceptible loss of quality.' Since this is also seemingly targeted at mobile, I'm guessing the lack of perceptible loss of quality is a direct function of screen size and pixel density on a smaller mobile devices. For me, this is another pointless advance in video technology. 720p…

> 720p or 1080p is fantastic video resolution, especially on a mobile phone. 720p is far from fantastic. It's noticeably blurry, even on mobile. 1080p is minimally acceptable, and is now over 10 years old. > Less than 1% of the population cares or wants higher resolution. That's a very bold claim. Have any studies or polls to back that up?

> 720p is far from fantastic. It's noticeably blurry, even on mobile. 1080p is minimally acceptable, and is now over 10 years old.

Not OP. I would say these are far-fetched claims that need defending. Most blurriness of mobile video comes from the low bitrate it's encoded at. Basically nobody is watching Bluray quality 720p or 1080p materials on a phone - and that's the problem, not the resolution.

My guess is that a typical middle or even middle-upper class family is going to have a TV that is less than 70 inches, and is 10+ feet from most viewers. Even with 20-20 vision, the full quality provided by 1080p is not even visible at that distance! (You'd need to go all the way up to 78 inches at 10 feet, or sit 7 feet from your 55 inch set to even get the full benefit from a 1080p set.) See this very helpful chart: http://s3.carltonbale.com/resolution_chart.html

Most of the benefit in 4k video comes from recent advances in HDR presentation and better codecs, not from the resolution. Sure, if you're a real stickler for quality, you might be sitting 6 feet from your 80 inch OLED set, and 4k is definitely for you in that case, but it's really not that important to the average person. In my case, I can barely distinguish between 720p and 1080p on my set even with glasses on.

Now granted, it's great to have laptops and tablets at higher resolutions, because your face is smashed up against them and you're often trying to read fine text. But that's not the video case that's being talked about here.

Re: H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)

#340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So compressing a 1080p video with H266 will not result in similar file size/quality improvements as a 4k video? How much are we looking at for 1080p, 10%?

>How much are we looking at for 1080p, 10%? We don't know yet. There are no public technical details (that I know of) for H266 yet, but if I recall H265 gave the same 50% reduction in bandwidth claims, and for years people stuck with H264, because it was higher quality due to dropping off less subtle parts of the video you really want to see. Only in the last couple of years has H265 really started to become embraced…

It was def hardware support that changes the piracy groups policies.
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