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The End of Video Coding? (medium.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Netflix's engineering team has an insightful post today that looks at how the industry is handling video coding; the differences in their methodologies; and the challenges new comers face. An excerpt, which sums up where we are:
"MPEG-2, VC1, H.263, H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, VP9, AV1 -- all of these standards were built on the block-based hybrid video coding structure. Attempts to veer away from this traditional model have been unsuccessful. In some cases (say, distributed video coding), it was because the technology was impractical for the prevalent use case. In most other cases, however, it is likely that not enough resources were invested in the new technology to allow for maturity.
"Unfortunately, new techniques are evaluated against the state-of-the-art codec, for which the coding tools have been refined from decades of investment. It is then easy to drop the new technology as "not at-par." Are we missing on better, more effective techniques by not allowing new tools to mature? How many redundant bits can we squeeze out if we simply stay on the paved path and iterate on the same set of encoding tools?"
"MPEG-2, VC1, H.263, H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, VP9, AV1 -- all of these standards were built on the block-based hybrid video coding structure. Attempts to veer away from this traditional model have been unsuccessful. In some cases (say, distributed video coding), it was because the technology was impractical for the prevalent use case. In most other cases, however, it is likely that not enough resources were invested in the new technology to allow for maturity.
"Unfortunately, new techniques are evaluated against the state-of-the-art codec, for which the coding tools have been refined from decades of investment. It is then easy to drop the new technology as "not at-par." Are we missing on better, more effective techniques by not allowing new tools to mature? How many redundant bits can we squeeze out if we simply stay on the paved path and iterate on the same set of encoding tools?"
In many parts of the world, that's already standard. I got gigabit fiber to my home for cheap in a 3rd world country.
So as far as me and my countrymen are concerned, we're good, even for 4K@60fps.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
The "hired very large codec dev team" they were contributing to is called "AOMedia - Alliance for Open Medi", and one of the potential rabbit hole that got considered and worked on was Daala by Xiph (tons of new crazy idea, including stuff like extending block as lapped blocks, a perceptual vector quantisation that doesn't rely on residual coding, etc.)
At the end of the day, the first thing that currently came out of AOMedia, by combining work such as Xph's Daala, Google's VP10 and Cisco's Thor, is AV-1.
It's much tamer that what it could have been, but still incorporate some interesting idea.
(they didn't go all the way to using the ANS entropy coders suggested more recently by experiment such as Daala, but at least replaced the usual arithmetic encoder with Daala's range encoder).
By the time AV-2 gets out, we should see some more interesting stuff.
Probably this speech was meant as a rousing speech to encourage developers to go crazy and try new stuff.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The revolution came from stable, standardized algorithms that allowed custom hardware to be built. Doing video decoding on general-purpose CPUs is never going to hold a candle to a custom H.264 chip.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.