8 ms·

This too shall pass, whatever will eventually become the standard, will be lossless, as it became with audio. An 2 hour uncompressed 3840x2160 24 bit image stre

by dusted 5y ago

This too shall pass, whatever will eventually become the standard, will be lossless, as it became with audio. An 2 hour uncompressed 3840x2160 24 bit image stream at 120 fps is just shy of 20 TiB, which seems like a lot, it's more than some people have in their systems.. Let's say that 4 TiB is reasonably widespread.. Then that super extravagant movie clip is about 5 times the size of your average drive, what a waste!!!1one well, sure, right now, but not in the future.. Point: in 1996 my harddrive had a formatted capacity just shy of 1 GiB of space Now my copy of the 1979 movie "Alien" takes up 16 GiB, or 16 times the size of my 1996 drive, which is even more extreme. So sure, clever (lossy) image compression has its place in history, but it is going to fade, just as with audio, a lossless compression format will be the future.

yitchelle 5y ago
While the master should be lossless, for us who are just watching it, does it really have to be lossless? I think that we have reached a point where it is fine to consumed media as it is now, personal view.
- dusted 5y ago
  Need is defined as much by what's economical. Do we NEED flac files instead of 320kbit mp3's ? many people can't tell the difference, it's certainly "good enough" (tm), it's just that, at some point, it makes no economical difference, and then there's just no reason anymore to use a lossy format.
  - dangravell 5y ago
    That's not necessarily the reason people choose FLAC. Some people, myself included, simply feel it's "wrong" to throw data away. Remember you might need that data later for re-encoding or otherwise changing the audio.
    - dusted 5y ago
      I partially agree, I think everyone in principle feels it's wrong to throw data away, if there are absolutely no compromises to be had. "Hey, there are these two copies of a song, one was digitally filtered and does not contain all the detail, maybe you can't hear the difference, they're same price/speed/storage which one do you take?" Everyone takes the lossless. Start introducing different cost (in download speed, storage space, whatever) and peoples choices start diverging. But as the cost fall and become more identical between lossy and lossless, people will be more partial to lossless on principle alone. Give it 10-20 years, there will be head-fi streaming services offering lossless movie streaming.
  - hulitu 5y ago
    We do not have flacs or 320kbps mp3s. We have crappy 158kbps webm (youtube) which has the same audio quality like an 64 kbps mp3.
- mchusma 5y ago
  I believe that AVIF and JPEGXL are going to be the last "traditional codecs". But there had been good research on using neural nets for compression and decompression, and I expect the next codec to have massive improvements over these formats.
- hulitu 5y ago
  Why not ? why do we have to watch crap even when the impact is so low ?
jl6 5y ago
I no longer believe storage capacity growth will follow an exponential increase curve like it did in previous decades. If you look at the last 5-10 years you’ll see far slower growth than in the decade prior to that. So I believe we must still strive for a degree of storage efficiency.
- blitzar 5y ago
  Is there an environmental argument (reduce waste, save the planet) to be made at some point? There are many, possibly exagerated, pieces about the energy savings from something as simple as 'dark-mode'. These small changes if scaled to billions of users and hours represent a meaningful impact.
  - edflsafoiewq 5y ago
    Lossless video is a ridiculous idea, but video encoding suffers hard from Jevon's paradox. The demand for video in pixel-hours explodes way faster than coding efficiency increases, and increasing efficiency expands the market even further. To put it differently, you'll never optimize your way ahead of ten million people watching cat videos.
nyx-aiur 5y ago
If you think the past is an indicator for the future I got some bad news for you.
kettleballroll 5y ago
> whatever will eventually become the standard, will be lossless, as it became with audio At least ony bubble, the standard for audio is still lossless: I'm fairly sure 99.9% of all audio i consume is using something lossy:streamed over Spotify, in movies like Netflix, clips like YouTube, video Chats... Is that just my impression and technology moved to FLAC without me noticing?
imaginariet 5y ago
Even professional video production (movies, ...) shoot the raw material in lossy formats, albeit, with minimal compression. Not even they can afford lossless capture. Because while storage capacities do increase, so does the used video size, bit depth and framerate, and number of takes.

by dusted 5y ago

yitchelle 5y ago

While the master should be lossless, for us who are just watching it, does it really have to be lossless? I think that we have reached a point where it is fine to consumed media as it is now, personal view.

dusted 5y ago
Need is defined as much by what's economical. Do we NEED flac files instead of 320kbit mp3's ? many people can't tell the difference, it's certainly "good enough" (tm), it's just that, at some point, it makes no economical difference, and then there's just no reason anymore to use a lossy format.
- dangravell 5y ago
  That's not necessarily the reason people choose FLAC. Some people, myself included, simply feel it's "wrong" to throw data away. Remember you might need that data later for re-encoding or otherwise changing the audio.
  - dusted 5y ago
    I partially agree, I think everyone in principle feels it's wrong to throw data away, if there are absolutely no compromises to be had. "Hey, there are these two copies of a song, one was digitally filtered and does not contain all the detail, maybe you can't hear the difference, they're same price/speed/storage which one do you take?" Everyone takes the lossless. Start introducing different cost (in download speed, storage space, whatever) and peoples choices start diverging. But as the cost fall and become more identical between lossy and lossless, people will be more partial to lossless on principle alone. Give it 10-20 years, there will be head-fi streaming services offering lossless movie streaming.
- hulitu 5y ago
  We do not have flacs or 320kbps mp3s. We have crappy 158kbps webm (youtube) which has the same audio quality like an 64 kbps mp3.
mchusma 5y ago
I believe that AVIF and JPEGXL are going to be the last "traditional codecs". But there had been good research on using neural nets for compression and decompression, and I expect the next codec to have massive improvements over these formats.
hulitu 5y ago
Why not ? why do we have to watch crap even when the impact is so low ?

jl6 5y ago

I no longer believe storage capacity growth will follow an exponential increase curve like it did in previous decades. If you look at the last 5-10 years you’ll see far slower growth than in the decade prior to that. So I believe we must still strive for a degree of storage efficiency.

blitzar 5y ago
Is there an environmental argument (reduce waste, save the planet) to be made at some point? There are many, possibly exagerated, pieces about the energy savings from something as simple as 'dark-mode'. These small changes if scaled to billions of users and hours represent a meaningful impact.
- edflsafoiewq 5y ago
  Lossless video is a ridiculous idea, but video encoding suffers hard from Jevon's paradox. The demand for video in pixel-hours explodes way faster than coding efficiency increases, and increasing efficiency expands the market even further. To put it differently, you'll never optimize your way ahead of ten million people watching cat videos.

nyx-aiur 5y ago

If you think the past is an indicator for the future I got some bad news for you.

kettleballroll 5y ago

> whatever will eventually become the standard, will be lossless, as it became with audio At least ony bubble, the standard for audio is still lossless: I'm fairly sure 99.9% of all audio i consume is using something lossy:streamed over Spotify, in movies like Netflix, clips like YouTube, video Chats... Is that just my impression and technology moved to FLAC without me noticing?

imaginariet 5y ago

Even professional video production (movies, ...) shoot the raw material in lossy formats, albeit, with minimal compression. Not even they can afford lossless capture. Because while storage capacities do increase, so does the used video size, bit depth and framerate, and number of takes.