3 ms·

Youtube is a great example of the performance difference. Videos have risen in quality because of modern codecs, but old or cheap machines need to decode them i

Youtube is a great example of the performance difference. Videos have risen in quality because of modern codecs, but old or cheap machines need to decode them in software (sometimes in Javascript, which is terribly wasteful but works on every machine) because they lack a modern GPU. On the other hand, for most devices, the increased battery life, lower temperatures, and smaller RAM/disk space requirements are obvious improvements. Youtube could leave duplicate files with the old encoding on their servers (if you use an alternative frontend for Youtube, you can often see the old file formats still being available for old content!) but that's just wasted space with most of the world visiting from more recent devices. Most RAM usage increases in Chrome have come from advancements in the sandboxing architecture. Shared memory and process space could be used to attackaand bust out of sandboxes, so more isolation was added. I'm sure there are some more useless features leading to a jump in RAM usage as well, but the really big ones always seem to be the fact Chrome spawns a new, independent process for every tab/extension. I've also noticed how much impact ad blockers have these days. With the web becoming ever shittier, effective adblockers have become harder to make and need more resources to do their job. Software doesn't get slower just to make your day harder. In many cases, slow software is a result of replacing dangerous hacks by good implementations and changing requirements. FLV videos just don't cut it anymore, and I doubt h264 will be around in five years with h265 and AV1 making it's way to more and more devices.

smikhanov 3y ago
Excellent remark. For each "I needed an extra gigabyte of RAM in my computer to do the same thing as six years ago" complaint there is normally a valid reason like this. It's always not exactly the same thing as six years ago, really. Oh, and the same applies to the original blog post, too.
Culonavirus 3y ago
AV1 is a massive flop in my opinion. What was supposed to be the be all end all open source video format of the future just recently barely starts to pop up here and there. There are tech demos and talks of Youtube etc. using AV1, but in the same breath they say it's mostly for really low bitrate where the AV1 gains the most. Also I'm sure no one is looking forward to burn CPU time (or very lately, GPU time) on encoding 4k+ streams. Is that even financially viable? You save 30% on bandwith and spend 10000% more on server HW time. (I'll admit that these numbers are pulled from my ass, but they're based on a few years old knowledge of AV1 encoders being like 350-3500 times slower than h264 encoders, depending on optimization.) The entire "there was no usable encoder and no hw decoder for years" thing didn't help and even now it's still all slow and complex, who has time and money for that? AV1 is just too complex for what it produces in comparison with the good old h264 or vp9.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  AV1 performs just fine, the problem is that it started gaining popularity at a time that new hardware has exploded in cost, especially for computers. h265 has been in computer hardware for a while, but as I have found out trying to play some special h265 stream on my laptop in the train, software decodes will easily peg the CPU as much as AV1 does. h265 hardware decoding came out in 2015 with Nvidia's 9xx series, while AV1 took until the unaffordable Nvidia 30xx/Intel Xe/RDNA 2 generation to become available. Encoding support took even longer (RDNA3/Xe 2/Arc/40xx). In a few years, I'm sure it'll be as popular a format as h265 is today.

smikhanov 3y ago

Excellent remark. For each "I needed an extra gigabyte of RAM in my computer to do the same thing as six years ago" complaint there is normally a valid reason like this. It's always not exactly the same thing as six years ago, really. Oh, and the same applies to the original blog post, too.

Culonavirus 3y ago

AV1 is a massive flop in my opinion. What was supposed to be the be all end all open source video format of the future just recently barely starts to pop up here and there. There are tech demos and talks of Youtube etc. using AV1, but in the same breath they say it's mostly for really low bitrate where the AV1 gains the most. Also I'm sure no one is looking forward to burn CPU time (or very lately, GPU time) on encoding 4k+ streams. Is that even financially viable? You save 30% on bandwith and spend 10000% more on server HW time. (I'll admit that these numbers are pulled from my ass, but they're based on a few years old knowledge of AV1 encoders being like 350-3500 times slower than h264 encoders, depending on optimization.) The entire "there was no usable encoder and no hw decoder for years" thing didn't help and even now it's still all slow and complex, who has time and money for that? AV1 is just too complex for what it produces in comparison with the good old h264 or vp9.

jeroenhd 3y ago
AV1 performs just fine, the problem is that it started gaining popularity at a time that new hardware has exploded in cost, especially for computers. h265 has been in computer hardware for a while, but as I have found out trying to play some special h265 stream on my laptop in the train, software decodes will easily peg the CPU as much as AV1 does. h265 hardware decoding came out in 2015 with Nvidia's 9xx series, while AV1 took until the unaffordable Nvidia 30xx/Intel Xe/RDNA 2 generation to become available. Encoding support took even longer (RDNA3/Xe 2/Arc/40xx). In a few years, I'm sure it'll be as popular a format as h265 is today.