Video codecs DON'T WORK THAT WAY! It's idiotic to claim CPUs were fast enough on $DATE.
How powerful of a processor you need to decode a video (in realtime) depends heavily on the video parameters. Resolution, bitrate and other parameters chosen (eg. number of B-frames, GOP size, etc), as well as some client-side issues, such as tuning of the codec and performance of the player software, not to mention whether the decoder is skipping steps like in-loop deblocking to cheat, all have a huge impact.
And no, CPUs weren't fast enough a year later. Maybe in some very specific circumstances, such as constrained profiles, low-definition, and low bitrate H.264 video. But in the case of 1080p, with reasonable bitrates, people were struggling mitily for years to get their systems to decode it without lag in the high-bitrate/complex sections. Go check the mailing-list archives of an open source video player from that period iif you don't want to believe it.
I'm not defending any of the US' actions. I'm just pointing out that Snowden isn't Al-awlaki, nor Manning, and it's pure paranoid psychotic ramblings to claim he'd be treated like either one.
Re-read my first comment. The license mismatch most certainly doesn't guarantee LO will surpass AOO. If it did, proprietary forks of open source projects would have taken over the world long ago.
Spending resources to chase the tail of another project distracts from other work you COULD be doing, and could convince your contributors that instead of the extra work, they should just go upstream and skip the whole thing.
And those theoretical "10X as many improvements" makes it HARDER to merge patches from upstream, as "project A" is the one diverging, rather than upstream sabotage, but still has the same effect.
it seems that AOO has the mindshare of the users and LO has the mindshare of the developers
I'd like to see some proof of that. The LO guys have a bad tendency to lie through their teeth about all their statistics they give to the public and the press:
The United States government has made it clear its intentions towards Snowden: They've already caused at least one major diplomatic incident involving violating the rights of a foreign head of state to try to get to him.
Please offer ANY evidence the US had ANY involvement in that incident.
I have every reason to believe Snowden is on the short list for getting the Anwar Al-Awlaki treatment if he goes to somewhere that the US can get a drone to,
Tin-foil hat on too tight? Al-awlaki was promoting terrorism, and associated with Al Qaeda. Snowden isn't suspected of anything remotely as serious. It's pure baseless paranoia.
and the Bradley Manning treatment if he otherwise ends up in US hands.
When you sign-up for the Military, you sign over your habeas corpus and lots of other rights. Snowden was never in the military, so it can't get that kind of treatment. He'll be held in a federal prison, by federal guards, and under the authority of federal judges. There is zero similarity to Bradly Manning's situation.
So what if the bulk of non-pirated comes from closed source encoders... what does that have to do x264 or x265 or H.265 development?
It means the actual delivered content won't be any better than what we've got now. Quite possibly worse. It's quite a common phenomena when new lossy formats come out. You'd know that if you had a clue about the subject.
Do you understand that H.265 is essentially a superset of H.264? You know, as in H.264 + extensions
You could say that all modern video codecs are essentially supersets of H.261... But that doesn't mean you can bolt on feature XYZ to the previous encoder and get your 50% improvement. Either x265 will get a lot of development effort and will become a very good codec, or it won't, and other formats with more development effort will outperform it. These are fickle issues that are hard to predict. In any case, it's nothing so brainlessly simple as "THIS NEW FORMAT IS X% BETTER THAN THE OLD ONE!!!"
So what you attribute is primarily due to codec and then codec parameters and then software optimisations.
Some ASP codecs outperform some AVC codecs. The newer format doesn't magically offer improvements.
You could have said "I hate standards.. I love open source... I hope H.265 fails"... much quicker and doesn't need any pretence of understanding video codecs.
You could have said "I'm a shill for a MPEG-LA patent holder" much quicker than playing dumb and twisting things around to try and make a straw-man.
The Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) added support for H.264 compression and 1080p resolutions to the A/72 standard in 2008. My understanding is that FCC approval is pending.
ATSC writes all kinds of crazy standards that will NEVER be used. ATSC for satellite, cable, mobile, and handheld? Nobody uses it. Cable is QAM and satellite is universally DVB-S or DVB-S2. M/H is a joke that everyone just ignores.
The FCC will never approve any incompatible changes to OTA broadcast TV for decades to come. The installed base of hundreds of millions of TVs would be far too costly to replace.
The conversion to HDTV took close to two decades, several acts of congress, massive spending from broadcasters and consumers, and more. And it only went through because after half a century, our broadcast TV standards were woefully out of date and it was apparent that improvements were needed. It's simply not going to happen again in the foreseeable future, and it's ludicrous to claim otherwise.
50 years? Technology doesn't move that slow anymore.
"Technology" never moved that slow, but broadcast standards certainly did, and still do. Feel free to buy your 4K 3-D TV, but good luck finding content for it, as nobody else will, just as they didn't choose highdef or flat-screen displays until the FCC mandated it as the future of broadcast TV.
Regarding Musepack (MPC), that is an obscure format that was generally on par with Vorbis back in the day (but Vorbis has been improved a few times since then while Musepack has not).
I'll re-iterate my first comment:
"temporal domain codecs can outperform any frequency-domain codecs" (at high bitrates)
Vorbis is a frequency domain codec. Musepack necessarily beats it at high bitrates, every time. Don't like Musepack? Okay. Pick another temporal-domain codec, and it'll beat Vorbis, Opus, AAC, and any other frequency-domain codec you can come up with. It's not a debate, there's no listening tests required. It's provable. I believe the oldest one still around is MPEG-1 Layer II, which again will always necessarily beat AAC, Opus, Vorbis, etc., at high bitrates.
We don't seem to be getting quality listening tests for higher bitrates any more. Everybody is obsessed with super-low bitrate
That's because the earliest standard codecs like MP2 came extremely close to the theoretical limits of Perceptual Entropy. Musepack did even better, and is probably right at the limit. You can't possibly do any better. The only place there is much room for improvement is in non-transparent audio, ie. low bitrates that don't need to sound perfectly like the original.
(Google noted VP9 was ~7% behind h.265 in Q4 2011)
They've more recently claimed VP9 beats HEVC across the board: "we've produced a codec that shows video quality that is slightly better than HEVC (H.265)"
or perhaps wait for Daala or some Dirac-like wavelet codec to come out of left field
Xiph,org has a shoddy history with video codecs. They royally screwed up with VP3. When released as open source, it outperformed all the standard codecs available at the time, but they sat on it for a decade, and finally released something that wasn't any better than VP3 long after H.264 had gained a solid grip, and could vastly outperforming it easily. VP9 has some hope of getting somewhere, in large part because Xiph doesn't have their hands in it.
At this point I'd throw wavelets in the bucket with fractal compression, and all the other theoretical methods that never worked-out in reality. Things we later find out weren't really efficient or perhaps even theoretically possible.
there is no upstream/downstream relationship that one would usually understand that term as in the FOSS world
If one is pulling code from the other, but not the other way around, there is definitely an upstream. In this case it's dictated by license instead of a nice clear project ancestry, but it still clearly operates like an upstream/downstream set of projects.
the newer machines will crunch through those videos while the older one will suffer. Big push for updating those toys.
It took YEARS after the release of H.264 before ANY CPUs could do realtime playback of highdef videos. That's why there was such a big push for H.264 decoding in GPUs, but that came years later.
By the time I had any need of a hardware h264 decoder in Linux, the drivers were readily available and used by all of the relevant software.
So? You were a VERY LATE ADOPTER of H.264, which doesn't remotely represent the rest of the world. H.264 has been around since 2003, and people have been struggling to watch H.264 videos in realtime on top-of-the-line CPUs from the start, and failing miserably for years. It took several years to get it decoded by GPUs even on Windows, and longer still before Linux could do it with VADPU or other frameworks. GP was absolutely correct about how it progressed.
Of course, it also shows how much marketing (yes, marketing) needs to go into VP9 - h.264 is too established for VP8 to be of any threat. But the next-gen codec field is wide open - will it be h.265? Or VP9? Or something else? (All it would take is Google to heavily promote and advertise VP9, and grease enough people so that MPEG-5 can include VP9 as a codec in part of the standard).
Google doesn't need the MPEG to get VP9 into widespread use. They've got their video and audio codecs fully developed (VP9/Opus), a container format (MKV/WebM), encoding and decoding software, client platforms they control (Android, Chrome, Chromium, Firefox, etc.), and the biggest internet video service (YouTube).
If they bite the bullet, and require Android phones to include VP9/Opus support, then convert YouTube to VP9/Opus and drop Flash and H.264, their format will own the internet in no time at all. Even Apple and Microsoft (staunch defender of H.264 patent-holders) will have no choice but to support the format on all their devices, lest they take away their user's YouTube viewing privileges, and face incredible backlash.
And just as Blu-ray Disc with AVC replaced DVD-Video with MPEG-2, whatever optical disc format replaces Blu-ray Disc is likely to include HEVC as an option for 4K video.
Blu-ray hasn't exactly replaced DVDs... so it's probably a better analogy than you think. We're still stuck with MPEG-2 all over the place.
And I don't expect to see anything better than Blu-ray for another generation. Blu-ray only has a market because the FCC forced the HDTV upgrade, creating a substantial market for 1080i TVs, then early adopters driving the price down for the rest of the market.
The electronics industry DESPERATELY wants to push for everyone to buy a new, more expensive TV once again, but their efforts are falling flat. 3D TVs, 4K TVs, etc. It's foolish and pointless, and it won't happen until the FCC mandates a newer, incompatible, higher resolution video format, which just isn't going to happen for another 50 years, like NTSC TV broadcasts before it. At that point, yeah, the latest video codecs will get used. Until then, there's no compelling reason to spend that much money for a minor upgrade.
Ogg Opus (open, royalty-free, not patent-encumbered audio) beats the pants off of HE-AAC (which, in turn, is superior to everything else at pretty much every level).
Wow! So much wrong in just a single sentence...
Opus is an IETF developed codec, based on CELT from Xiph.org, and Silk from Skype/Microsoft.
HE-AAC certainly isn't "superior" at "every level". It excels at very low bitrate encoding that sounds SOMEWHAT like the original. As you start increasing the bitrate (eg 96k), low-complexity AAC easily surpasses HE-AAC. And as you go to higher bitrates still (eg. 160k), temporal domain codecs can outperform any frequency-domain codecs, so Musepack will beat the pants of AAC, and even Opus.
Still, low bitrate lossy audio quality is important, so Opus is a good choice for streaming audio and video. That's why Google chose it for their latest revision of WebM, along with their new VP9 codec that they claim outperforms HEVC.
I seriously doubt the MPEG / MPEG-LA organizations, and their members, will consider using a patent-free audio codec along with their heavily patent-encumbered video codec. Their business model is patents, and they'll chose an expensive and inferior option over a free one, any day. I'd expect HE-AACv2 to be the best you can count on for the foreseeable future.
It's very hard to break away from the lowest-common-denominator. Just look at MP3.
Smartphones didn't have a common standard video format before H.264 came along. H.265 is going to require much more computation, which will be possible in a few years, but I would fully expect H.264 to stay entrenched for a long, long time to come, and H.265 being an also-ran technology some high-end phones will start supporting, and us techies will rant about, while nobody else really cares...
Besides that, Google is now the major force in the mobile phone market, and they just released their new VP9 codec that they claim surpasses HEVC/H.265. If they throw their weight around just a little bit, they can mandate all new Android phones must support WebM with VP9 and Opus. And if they go further and threaten to drop H.264 videos from YouTube, I'm sure even Apple won't be able to fight them.
25-35% less file size for the same quality is an incredible advance.
No, it really isn't.
First off, we're just talking about PSNR per bitrate, which is pretty meaningless. They even say in TFA that they could have used the "--psnr" option to increase the PSNR, at the expense of video that looks like crap. At least SSIM would have been less easy to fool than PSNR. At the end of the day, there's nothing better than a subjective expert human visual comparison.
Secondly, look at a few of those charts. The specific encoder you use makes a HELL of a lot more difference than the codec/format. Other H.264 encoders don't come close to x264. If x265 doesn't get the same kind of open source development boost, x264 will continue to improve, and probably outperform the newer format, as proprietary codec developers just haven't shown themselves willing or able to do a good job of perceptual encoding, yet that's where the bulk of our non-pirated content comes from... And those pirate rips aren't exactly encoded by experts, so they tend to be crap that can be easily surpassed by MPEG-2 encodings.
And finally, Google claims their patent-free VP9 codec, which was recently finalized, will outperform H.265/HEVC. Even if they're over-promising, I'm sure it'll be close enough. And if we get open source developers working on and optimizing VP9/libvpx, while shunning HEVC, then the patent-free codec could fly past the patent-encumbered one easily enough. And for the first time in history, we'll have non-proprietary audio and video codecs that can outperform the expensive and patented kind, laying to rest the contentious HTML5 video debate, back when Theora really didn't have a snowball's chance in hell against H.264.
Let's just hope Google is actually committed this time, and will convert more than 4% of their Youtube catalog to WebM in the next 4 years... This time using the new and improved VP9 and Opus, instead of just using it as a threat to get cheap licensing for the proprietary codecs.
They are merging! LibreOffice imports all useful bits.
Is that the same way Linux and FreeBSD are "merging"?
And yet Linux doesn't yet have a modern file system...
ZFS works great on FreeBSD. HAMMER from DragonFly BSD is damn good as well. BTRFS still sucks, YEARS after it SHOULD HAVE been stable.
Having a license that supposedly allows you to suck the marrow out of the upstream project doesn't really solve your problems for you, and you can certainly still fall behind.
If the LibreOffice guys were smart, they'd be contributing as many of their changes as possible to the upstream project, so they won't have to do extra maintenance, and more people would benefit from them. Of course, if those LO guys were smart, they would have picked a slightly less horrific and painful NAME for their project...
Nope. That number Just doesn't mesh with those Akamai numbers AT ALL. They don't list ANY country, ANYWHERE near that speed, yet several would have to be well above that speed to bring up the average. South Korea is the fastest on the map, at only 14.2 Mbps There must be a vastly different methodology used to come up with the different numbers, so it's just not comparable.
First off, practically all outdoor lighting SHOULD be low-pressure sodium. It's the most efficient you can get, it has a narrow spectrum that won't affect astronomy, and the amber tint doesn't harm your night vision nearly as much as white light.
Secondly, as other have said, aim it all properly. You want to light up your walkway, fine, focus on that area with the minimum light you need, and keep the rest dark if possible. With lights always installed above your head, omnidirectionality doesn't make any sense, as about 80% of that light will be shining off into the sky where it's useless and causes that light pollution.
Much like fuel mileage ratings on vehicles, we get a lot more benefit by getting people with the lowest numbers up to more reasonable numbers (eg., dial-up to 1Mbps DSL) than we do by giving a select few a very high speed connection to bring up the "average" speed, while many people suffer with dial-up speeds...
Perhaps it would be best to measure MEDIAN speeds, rather than AVERAGE. Or better yet, a percentage of people in the country with available speeds below XYZ.
And where does the whole EU rank? I'm sure if we broke the US down into individual states, some would come out higher than average as well, putting them ahead of most EU member nations. And there are clearly a number of EU member nations falling well behind the US average, which would bring the EU average down. The other comparable countries, like Russia, China, India, etc., all are far behind the US average. So even with these numbers, it doesn't look all that bad for the US.
Spielberg, Lucas, and Soderberg are all just aging hacks yelling "Get off my lawn". They're complaining how hard it is for THEM to get a movie funded, as if they're the best there is, when in fact they're all really washed-up fossils, not the titans they might once have been. When is the last time any of them released a blockbuster? Jurassic Park in 91? They're just useless old men telling a bunch of war stories and blaming it on someone... ANYONE else, that they've lost their privlidged places in hollywood.
Hollywood has gone way down hill... No question about it. But there Have been worthwhile movies speckled throughout, and there are signs that things are finally improving. Part of that improvement is probably that studios are not stupid enough to give these washed-up big names a blank check whenever they want to squeeze out a stinker.
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The most horrible things our government has done have been out in the open, public knowledge, NOT illegal conspiracies.
And there are far more leaks from the US government today than ever before, so we'd definitely hear about it...
Video codecs DON'T WORK THAT WAY! It's idiotic to claim CPUs were fast enough on $DATE.
How powerful of a processor you need to decode a video (in realtime) depends heavily on the video parameters. Resolution, bitrate and other parameters chosen (eg. number of B-frames, GOP size, etc), as well as some client-side issues, such as tuning of the codec and performance of the player software, not to mention whether the decoder is skipping steps like in-loop deblocking to cheat, all have a huge impact.
And no, CPUs weren't fast enough a year later. Maybe in some very specific circumstances, such as constrained profiles, low-definition, and low bitrate H.264 video. But in the case of 1080p, with reasonable bitrates, people were struggling mitily for years to get their systems to decode it without lag in the high-bitrate/complex sections. Go check the mailing-list archives of an open source video player from that period iif you don't want to believe it.
I'm not defending any of the US' actions. I'm just pointing out that Snowden isn't Al-awlaki, nor Manning, and it's pure paranoid psychotic ramblings to claim he'd be treated like either one.
Most countries in Western Europe are NATO countries, so that's just the odds.
In addition, I believe the only country that admitted to denying flyover was Portugal, while the other two have contradicted the claim.
Re-read my first comment. The license mismatch most certainly doesn't guarantee LO will surpass AOO. If it did, proprietary forks of open source projects would have taken over the world long ago.
Spending resources to chase the tail of another project distracts from other work you COULD be doing, and could convince your contributors that instead of the extra work, they should just go upstream and skip the whole thing.
And those theoretical "10X as many improvements" makes it HARDER to merge patches from upstream, as "project A" is the one diverging, rather than upstream sabotage, but still has the same effect.
I'd like to see some proof of that. The LO guys have a bad tendency to lie through their teeth about all their statistics they give to the public and the press:
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2012/11/libreoffices-dubious-claims-part-3-developers.html
Please offer ANY evidence the US had ANY involvement in that incident.
Tin-foil hat on too tight? Al-awlaki was promoting terrorism, and associated with Al Qaeda. Snowden isn't suspected of anything remotely as serious. It's pure baseless paranoia.
When you sign-up for the Military, you sign over your habeas corpus and lots of other rights. Snowden was never in the military, so it can't get that kind of treatment. He'll be held in a federal prison, by federal guards, and under the authority of federal judges. There is zero similarity to Bradly Manning's situation.
Not DESTROYING their recently repaired relationship with the US? You know, one of their big allies, who gives them truck-loads of cash?
That might be something...
It means the actual delivered content won't be any better than what we've got now. Quite possibly worse. It's quite a common phenomena when new lossy formats come out. You'd know that if you had a clue about the subject.
You could say that all modern video codecs are essentially supersets of H.261... But that doesn't mean you can bolt on feature XYZ to the previous encoder and get your 50% improvement. Either x265 will get a lot of development effort and will become a very good codec, or it won't, and other formats with more development effort will outperform it. These are fickle issues that are hard to predict. In any case, it's nothing so brainlessly simple as "THIS NEW FORMAT IS X% BETTER THAN THE OLD ONE!!!"
Some ASP codecs outperform some AVC codecs. The newer format doesn't magically offer improvements.
You could have said "I'm a shill for a MPEG-LA patent holder" much quicker than playing dumb and twisting things around to try and make a straw-man.
ATSC writes all kinds of crazy standards that will NEVER be used. ATSC for satellite, cable, mobile, and handheld? Nobody uses it. Cable is QAM and satellite is universally DVB-S or DVB-S2. M/H is a joke that everyone just ignores.
The FCC will never approve any incompatible changes to OTA broadcast TV for decades to come. The installed base of hundreds of millions of TVs would be far too costly to replace.
The conversion to HDTV took close to two decades, several acts of congress, massive spending from broadcasters and consumers, and more. And it only went through because after half a century, our broadcast TV standards were woefully out of date and it was apparent that improvements were needed. It's simply not going to happen again in the foreseeable future, and it's ludicrous to claim otherwise.
"Technology" never moved that slow, but broadcast standards certainly did, and still do. Feel free to buy your 4K 3-D TV, but good luck finding content for it, as nobody else will, just as they didn't choose highdef or flat-screen displays until the FCC mandated it as the future of broadcast TV.
I'll re-iterate my first comment:
"temporal domain codecs can outperform any frequency-domain codecs" (at high bitrates)
Vorbis is a frequency domain codec. Musepack necessarily beats it at high bitrates, every time. Don't like Musepack? Okay. Pick another temporal-domain codec, and it'll beat Vorbis, Opus, AAC, and any other frequency-domain codec you can come up with. It's not a debate, there's no listening tests required. It's provable. I believe the oldest one still around is MPEG-1 Layer II, which again will always necessarily beat AAC, Opus, Vorbis, etc., at high bitrates.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-1#Quality
That's because the earliest standard codecs like MP2 came extremely close to the theoretical limits of Perceptual Entropy. Musepack did even better, and is probably right at the limit. You can't possibly do any better. The only place there is much room for improvement is in non-transparent audio, ie. low bitrates that don't need to sound perfectly like the original.
They've more recently claimed VP9 beats HEVC across the board: "we've produced a codec that shows video quality that is slightly better than HEVC (H.265)"
http://blog.webmproject.org/2013/07/vp9-lands-in-chrome-dev-channel.html
Xiph,org has a shoddy history with video codecs. They royally screwed up with VP3. When released as open source, it outperformed all the standard codecs available at the time, but they sat on it for a decade, and finally released something that wasn't any better than VP3 long after H.264 had gained a solid grip, and could vastly outperforming it easily. VP9 has some hope of getting somewhere, in large part because Xiph doesn't have their hands in it.
At this point I'd throw wavelets in the bucket with fractal compression, and all the other theoretical methods that never worked-out in reality. Things we later find out weren't really efficient or perhaps even theoretically possible.
Great!
Any way we can distribute extra iodine to /. trolls and flamers?
As much as possible, please!
If one is pulling code from the other, but not the other way around, there is definitely an upstream. In this case it's dictated by license instead of a nice clear project ancestry, but it still clearly operates like an upstream/downstream set of projects.
It took YEARS after the release of H.264 before ANY CPUs could do realtime playback of highdef videos. That's why there was such a big push for H.264 decoding in GPUs, but that came years later.
So? You were a VERY LATE ADOPTER of H.264, which doesn't remotely represent the rest of the world. H.264 has been around since 2003, and people have been struggling to watch H.264 videos in realtime on top-of-the-line CPUs from the start, and failing miserably for years. It took several years to get it decoded by GPUs even on Windows, and longer still before Linux could do it with VADPU or other frameworks. GP was absolutely correct about how it progressed.
Google doesn't need the MPEG to get VP9 into widespread use. They've got their video and audio codecs fully developed (VP9/Opus), a container format (MKV/WebM), encoding and decoding software, client platforms they control (Android, Chrome, Chromium, Firefox, etc.), and the biggest internet video service (YouTube).
If they bite the bullet, and require Android phones to include VP9/Opus support, then convert YouTube to VP9/Opus and drop Flash and H.264, their format will own the internet in no time at all. Even Apple and Microsoft (staunch defender of H.264 patent-holders) will have no choice but to support the format on all their devices, lest they take away their user's YouTube viewing privileges, and face incredible backlash.
Blu-ray hasn't exactly replaced DVDs... so it's probably a better analogy than you think. We're still stuck with MPEG-2 all over the place.
And I don't expect to see anything better than Blu-ray for another generation. Blu-ray only has a market because the FCC forced the HDTV upgrade, creating a substantial market for 1080i TVs, then early adopters driving the price down for the rest of the market.
The electronics industry DESPERATELY wants to push for everyone to buy a new, more expensive TV once again, but their efforts are falling flat. 3D TVs, 4K TVs, etc. It's foolish and pointless, and it won't happen until the FCC mandates a newer, incompatible, higher resolution video format, which just isn't going to happen for another 50 years, like NTSC TV broadcasts before it. At that point, yeah, the latest video codecs will get used. Until then, there's no compelling reason to spend that much money for a minor upgrade.
Wow! So much wrong in just a single sentence...
Opus is an IETF developed codec, based on CELT from Xiph.org, and Silk from Skype/Microsoft.
HE-AAC certainly isn't "superior" at "every level". It excels at very low bitrate encoding that sounds SOMEWHAT like the original. As you start increasing the bitrate (eg 96k), low-complexity AAC easily surpasses HE-AAC. And as you go to higher bitrates still (eg. 160k), temporal domain codecs can outperform any frequency-domain codecs, so Musepack will beat the pants of AAC, and even Opus.
Still, low bitrate lossy audio quality is important, so Opus is a good choice for streaming audio and video. That's why Google chose it for their latest revision of WebM, along with their new VP9 codec that they claim outperforms HEVC.
I seriously doubt the MPEG / MPEG-LA organizations, and their members, will consider using a patent-free audio codec along with their heavily patent-encumbered video codec. Their business model is patents, and they'll chose an expensive and inferior option over a free one, any day. I'd expect HE-AACv2 to be the best you can count on for the foreseeable future.
It's very hard to break away from the lowest-common-denominator. Just look at MP3.
Smartphones didn't have a common standard video format before H.264 came along. H.265 is going to require much more computation, which will be possible in a few years, but I would fully expect H.264 to stay entrenched for a long, long time to come, and H.265 being an also-ran technology some high-end phones will start supporting, and us techies will rant about, while nobody else really cares...
Besides that, Google is now the major force in the mobile phone market, and they just released their new VP9 codec that they claim surpasses HEVC/H.265. If they throw their weight around just a little bit, they can mandate all new Android phones must support WebM with VP9 and Opus. And if they go further and threaten to drop H.264 videos from YouTube, I'm sure even Apple won't be able to fight them.
No, it really isn't.
First off, we're just talking about PSNR per bitrate, which is pretty meaningless. They even say in TFA that they could have used the "--psnr" option to increase the PSNR, at the expense of video that looks like crap. At least SSIM would have been less easy to fool than PSNR. At the end of the day, there's nothing better than a subjective expert human visual comparison.
Secondly, look at a few of those charts. The specific encoder you use makes a HELL of a lot more difference than the codec/format. Other H.264 encoders don't come close to x264. If x265 doesn't get the same kind of open source development boost, x264 will continue to improve, and probably outperform the newer format, as proprietary codec developers just haven't shown themselves willing or able to do a good job of perceptual encoding, yet that's where the bulk of our non-pirated content comes from... And those pirate rips aren't exactly encoded by experts, so they tend to be crap that can be easily surpassed by MPEG-2 encodings.
And finally, Google claims their patent-free VP9 codec, which was recently finalized, will outperform H.265/HEVC. Even if they're over-promising, I'm sure it'll be close enough. And if we get open source developers working on and optimizing VP9/libvpx, while shunning HEVC, then the patent-free codec could fly past the patent-encumbered one easily enough. And for the first time in history, we'll have non-proprietary audio and video codecs that can outperform the expensive and patented kind, laying to rest the contentious HTML5 video debate, back when Theora really didn't have a snowball's chance in hell against H.264.
Let's just hope Google is actually committed this time, and will convert more than 4% of their Youtube catalog to WebM in the next 4 years... This time using the new and improved VP9 and Opus, instead of just using it as a threat to get cheap licensing for the proprietary codecs.
Is that the same way Linux and FreeBSD are "merging"?
And yet Linux doesn't yet have a modern file system...
ZFS works great on FreeBSD. HAMMER from DragonFly BSD is damn good as well. BTRFS still sucks, YEARS after it SHOULD HAVE been stable.
Having a license that supposedly allows you to suck the marrow out of the upstream project doesn't really solve your problems for you, and you can certainly still fall behind.
If the LibreOffice guys were smart, they'd be contributing as many of their changes as possible to the upstream project, so they won't have to do extra maintenance, and more people would benefit from them. Of course, if those LO guys were smart, they would have picked a slightly less horrific and painful NAME for their project...
Nope. That number Just doesn't mesh with those Akamai numbers AT ALL. They don't list ANY country, ANYWHERE near that speed, yet several would have to be well above that speed to bring up the average. South Korea is the fastest on the map, at only 14.2 Mbps There must be a vastly different methodology used to come up with the different numbers, so it's just not comparable.
First off, practically all outdoor lighting SHOULD be low-pressure sodium. It's the most efficient you can get, it has a narrow spectrum that won't affect astronomy, and the amber tint doesn't harm your night vision nearly as much as white light.
Secondly, as other have said, aim it all properly. You want to light up your walkway, fine, focus on that area with the minimum light you need, and keep the rest dark if possible. With lights always installed above your head, omnidirectionality doesn't make any sense, as about 80% of that light will be shining off into the sky where it's useless and causes that light pollution.
Much like fuel mileage ratings on vehicles, we get a lot more benefit by getting people with the lowest numbers up to more reasonable numbers (eg., dial-up to 1Mbps DSL) than we do by giving a select few a very high speed connection to bring up the "average" speed, while many people suffer with dial-up speeds...
Perhaps it would be best to measure MEDIAN speeds, rather than AVERAGE. Or better yet, a percentage of people in the country with available speeds below XYZ.
And where does the whole EU rank? I'm sure if we broke the US down into individual states, some would come out higher than average as well, putting them ahead of most EU member nations. And there are clearly a number of EU member nations falling well behind the US average, which would bring the EU average down. The other comparable countries, like Russia, China, India, etc., all are far behind the US average. So even with these numbers, it doesn't look all that bad for the US.
Spielberg, Lucas, and Soderberg are all just aging hacks yelling "Get off my lawn". They're complaining how hard it is for THEM to get a movie funded, as if they're the best there is, when in fact they're all really washed-up fossils, not the titans they might once have been. When is the last time any of them released a blockbuster? Jurassic Park in 91? They're just useless old men telling a bunch of war stories and blaming it on someone... ANYONE else, that they've lost their privlidged places in hollywood.
Hollywood has gone way down hill... No question about it. But there Have been worthwhile movies speckled throughout, and there are signs that things are finally improving. Part of that improvement is probably that studios are not stupid enough to give these washed-up big names a blank check whenever they want to squeeze out a stinker.
Ads won't kill me. In fact I'd like to see PBS get a little extra funding out of the deal.