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Codecs have come and gone all the time. Your best bet for the web as late as 2007 was transcoding to VP6. How could anyone invest in a toolchain that can't supp
by prodigal_erik 16y ago
Codecs have come and gone all the time. Your best bet for the web as late as 2007 was transcoding to VP6. How could anyone invest in a toolchain that can't support any codec other than H.264, knowing such a poor design wouldn't have been viable just a few years before? Did they think the industry wouldn't agree on any improvements, ever?
- bonaldi 16y agoIt's not the actual codec that matters. It's that if you have one given codec end-to-end throughout your entire workflow and it lets you drive everything from broadcast to mobile phone, why would you then support an oddball outlier without any proven technical advantage and with no new audience? Of course you can plug in another transcoder on the end of the output chain, but why not just serve the h264 holdouts yet more Flash and keep your existing archive and workflow untouched?
- prodigal_erik 16y agoI wouldn't spend real effort keeping transcoding out of a pipeline. One codec end-to-end for all audiences is not the normal state of affairs but a convenient aberration. Sooner or later (I doubt it'll be more than a couple of years) somebody's going to achieve 95% of the quality with 50% of the power budget, or fully capitalize on the redundancy of 3D footage, or something like that.