H.264 is Magic

Absolutely love this: 'Suppose you have some strange coin - you've tossed it 10 times, and every time it lands on heads. How would you describe this information to someone? You wouldn't say HHHHHHHHH. You would just say "10 tosses, all heads" - bam! You've just compressed some data! Easy. I saved you hours of mindfuck lectures.' This is a really great, simple way to explain what is otherwise a fairly complex concept to the average bear. Great work.

The interesting thing about H.264 is that it achieves excellent compression rates not by a single "miracle trick", but by combining multiple small-gain techniques. Every technique lets you gain on the order of 1-3%, but when you combine them all, you get fantastic results. Another tidbit of (potentially) interesting information: it took many years for H.264 to achieve its full potential, for two reasons: 1) Implementing a decoder is really, really complicated, especially if you want it to run fast…

AV1 is more magic with better licensing. For their use case Meta is gradually getting to a baseline of VP9 and AV1 streams for their video streaming: https://www.streamingmedia.com/Producer/Articles/Editorial/F... And AV1 for video calls: https://engineering.fb.com/2024/03/20/video-engineering/mobi... Microsoft is starting to use AV1 in Teams. AV1 has video coding tools that are particularly useful for screen sharing: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/... Most of the video I see on…

Missing 2016 in title.