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I've seen this article before, and this part always stuck with me: > I captured the screen of this home page and produced two files: > PNG screenshot of the A

I've seen this article before, and this part always stuck with me: > I captured the screen of this home page and produced two files: > PNG screenshot of the Apple homepage 1015KB > 5 Second 60fps H.264 video of the same Apple homepage 175KB > Eh. What? Those file sizes look switched. > No, they're right. The H.264 video, 300 frames long is 175KB. A single frame of that video in PNG is 1015KB. The article does go into how and why this is possible (tl;dr H.264 is lossey, png is not), but for the difference in human-detectable quality, H.264 is astonishingly more efficient.

ChrisSD 7y ago
It's a good example but the difference doesn't quite have to be as dramatic as the article makes out. Screenshot tools rarely produce optimised PNGs. A quick test of the image in the article shows that optipng (lossless) can bring the size down to ~570kb or pngquant (lossy) to ~240kb. Zopfil could further compress the images produced by optipng or pngquant, but it's a case of diminishing returns at that point. To be clear the article makes a good comparison but I think it perhaps overstates the case to make a point.