"Understanding" is an interesting way of putting it. Traditionally "compression" is defined in terms of entropy and for lossy compression (eg. audio/video) ent

"Understanding" is an interesting way of putting it. Traditionally "compression" is defined in terms of entropy and for lossy compression (eg. audio/video) entropy is defined in terms of human perception. I would generalize your statement to "relationship of the past and future of the video stream" The main enabler of more advanced compression strategies is the higher performance available to the encoder. Decoders are essentially deterministic state machines. Encoders however have to search a large space of transformations to find ones that captures the entropy for a given situation. In the development of AV1 they called these transformation "tools" and the research encoder experimented with lots of them and only the most profitable ones made it into the standard. The compression can thus still evolve even with the AV1 standard frozen, just like how x264 and LAME have gotten so much better over their lifetime.