3 ms·

Incremental improvements in H.264 are still possible but not a halving of bitrate in the general case. The required rate depends very much on the content of th

Incremental improvements in H.264 are still possible but not a halving of bitrate in the general case. The required rate depends very much on the content of the video and the size at which it will be viewed. Any encoder manufacturer can find some great looking and easy to encode images that can be massively reduced in data rate without much visible impact. However in tougher scenarios they will be unlikely to beat the existing market leaders by more than 10% or so under similar constraints (latentcy/CPU/multi-pass possible) under the review of experts. Tough scenarios will be when there is lots of noise and non-uniform movement. Pop concerts can be very challenging with crowd movements, flashing lights and low general light levels leading to noise.

Tloewald 14y ago
The more detailed claim is 5-6Mbps streams can be reduced to 3-4, so it's more like a 25% improvement methinks. Their first claimed success was with JPEGmini — this is a lot more credible since JPEG is a pretty obsolete format that simply continues because it's so well supported. JPEG2000 delivers the purported benefits of JPEGmini for real -- it's just poorly supported. I suspect all they're really doing is fine-tuning compression settings based on differencing input and output using a decent perceptual algorithm. I uploaded a photo straight out of a Nikon V1 onto JPEGmini and got a 2.2x reduction. I could do better than that by dialing down quality until I saw a difference. JPEG fine is way overkill for most purposes, and that's their market.