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I thought hardware decoders are better than software thats why iphone is more efficient with h264 than vp8?
by jalino23 4y ago
I thought hardware decoders are better than software thats why iphone is more efficient with h264 than vp8?
- forgotpwd16 4y agoThey're more efficient but not as flexible so not absolutely better. Still using dedicated hardware for video decoding isn't GPU accelerated.
- bscphil 4y agoJust to spell out what this means to those who are unfamiliar: since software decoding involves general purpose software, decoders are available that can handle mostly any valid h264 video file. On the other hand, hardware decoders are purpose built and frequently handle only a subset of valid files. For instance, a decoder might (1) only handle encoding profiles < 5, as used by Blu-ray, (2) only support the most common bit depth of 8, (3) only support 4:2:0 chroma subsampled video and not 4:4:4. And so on.
- astrange 4y agoH264 decoders have to be bit-exact so there's no difference in what they do, but they use a lot less battery to do it, and they free the main CPU to do other things.