4 ms·

The article misses (but the comments here touch on) that all compression algorithms have a built in obsolescence, even the fancy shiny xz. It's not the algorit

by zbuf 11y ago

The article misses (but the comments here touch on) that all compression algorithms have a built in obsolescence, even the fancy shiny xz. It's not the algorithm per-se that go obsolete, but their use in specific cases until all are diminished. Whether lossy or lossless, eventually other technological advancements renders them unnecessary. And it seems that strongest algorithm is usually the earliest to be widely adopted; these are almost never toppled. Just like .gz, look at MP3 or JPEG -- 'better' alternatives exist, but the next widely adopted step will be to eliminate that compression entirely. The first radio station playout systems were hardware MPEG audio compression, and the next most widespread step was to uncompressed WAVs. Even video pipelines based on uncompressed frames are becoming more widespread. Eventually the complexity and unpredictability of compression is shunned for simplicity. Read the gzip docs and the focus is around compression of text source code, a key use case at the time but barely considered these days -- tar.gz source archives exist almost only out of habit; they could just as well be tar.

yaur 11y ago
Media codecs are a little different because there is a significant cost to replacing hardware that only supports the old standard. It seems to me that AAC is becoming pretty ubiquitous and probably will be the go to standard for the next 10-20 years. We are also at a point where the vast majority of users aren't going to notice the difference between a 100kbps MP3 vs AAC stream, which is going to be less than 1% of an he stream, so there is little incentive to innovate by the players with the deepest pockets. Until network capacity is free (or at least cheap compared to to the cost of CPE) pipelines based on uncompressed media are not going to be a thing outside of the production end of things. For source tar balls though there is basically 0 cost to switching. Since you can download a new compressor in under a minute and should be able to assume that your users are pretty sophisticated. The incentives are similar to media in that cost transfer has to be weighed against the cost of CPE, except that since users supply the CPE the cost is effectively 0 and compression will probably always make sense.

by zbuf 11y ago

yaur 11y ago

Media codecs are a little different because there is a significant cost to replacing hardware that only supports the old standard. It seems to me that AAC is becoming pretty ubiquitous and probably will be the go to standard for the next 10-20 years. We are also at a point where the vast majority of users aren't going to notice the difference between a 100kbps MP3 vs AAC stream, which is going to be less than 1% of an he stream, so there is little incentive to innovate by the players with the deepest pockets. Until network capacity is free (or at least cheap compared to to the cost of CPE) pipelines based on uncompressed media are not going to be a thing outside of the production end of things. For source tar balls though there is basically 0 cost to switching. Since you can download a new compressor in under a minute and should be able to assume that your users are pretty sophisticated. The incentives are similar to media in that cost transfer has to be weighed against the cost of CPE, except that since users supply the CPE the cost is effectively 0 and compression will probably always make sense.