> The thing is, human eyes and ears aren’t getting any better and computing performance seems to be plateauing. My guess is that we'll ideally end up with some

> The thing is, human eyes and ears aren’t getting any better and computing performance seems to be plateauing. My guess is that we'll ideally end up with something that isn't hard to use copyright/patent wise and offers "optimal" quality but at smaller file sizes when compared with the prior technologies, which would be a good thing for both storing your own video files, as well as when handling them en masse in most businesses. After all, if someone could reduce the bandwidth usage of their video hosting or streaming site by 10%, they'd be saving millions in hardware/networking expenses. Though I don't think that we're at that point yet, many of these more recent technologies are not widely supported, or just not good enough. For example, I rendered a ~6 minute 1080p video with Kdenlive with multiple codecs, to compare encode performance and resulting filesizes with the default settings: Codec Time Filesize H264 2:27 172 MB VP8 9:34 244 MB VP9 19:29 332 MB AV1 FAIL FAIL I probably should have figured out a way to get similar file sizes, but either way you can see that VP8 and VP9 take way longer to process when compared to the version of H264 that's available to me. So the old H264 is indeed a good enough choice for me, at least for now.