H.266/VVC Standard Finalized With ~50% Lower Size Compared To H.265

[pal666]

I have been incredibly annoyed at the slow pace of AV1 hardware decode adoption. It wasn't in Raspberry Pi 4, wasn't in the latest AMD/Nvidia/Intel graphics, etc. I think a couple of 8K TVs and SBCs have it.

av1 was finalized last year. hardware you are referring to was designed earlier.

AOMedia needs to get AV2 out the door so it can beat H.266 and finally reduce MPEG-LA's relevance.

aomedia already beat h.266 and resuced mpeg-la relevance. all content providers, all hardware vendors and all relevant software vendors are members of aomedia. all of them support av1(some in not yet released products), and nobody of them supports h.266

[pal666]

Sadly, Opus is not as ubiquitous as MP3

opus is streamed by google and used by voice communication software, that makes 100% for me

[pal666]

Then, people with decent audio setups tend to use lossless compression (flac and alac files) because filespace is not a big concern anymore.

flac has nothing to do with decency of audio setup, it can't be distinguished from high bitrate opus in blind testing. there's a case for it as a source format, but it doesn't make sense for listening

[morydris]

Well, yeah, master copies are still with us for a reason. Most of us won't hear the differences you speak about though.
I've had this conversation with a guy who recently spent like 2k on audio equipment (obviously not high-end, but better than what 90% of others have) and he laughed at my face when I told him he wouldn't be able to spot the MP3. But then he went on to actually try to spot the MP3 and came back telling me I was right.
Obviously, higher-end equipment makes the most minute differences apparent, but how relevant is that in this day and age when people turn to their phones for music consumption? Sure, it's more than relevant for producing music, but never in its wildest dreams has MP3 gone into a studio

Anecdote: I don't have a golden ear, but ~ 1997 when I first got access to MP2 (not MP3) I spent a lot of time A-B testing various options. One particular
Cranberry CD had bad artifacts no matter what I did ... until I noticed the issue was in the original audio CD (in pristine condition). Mind blown.

[Guest]

Would be interesting to see an article tracking the generated file sizes of all the video compression algorithms from back in the day, although MPEG1,2 probably can't do 4K and these newer ones are probably more efficient at the higher resolutions. I'm constantly amazed at each generation's advances.

"the previous standard H.265/HEVC requires ca. 10 gigabytes of data to transmit a 90-min UHD video. With this new technology, only 5 gigabytes of data are required to achieve the same quality."

Looks like we can move back to plain old DVD as a storage medium from BluRay!

Only for Studio Ghibli and similar movies, those are the main ones that are 90 mins or less 😋

Most people are going to stream anyway, so they'll see even lower bitrates and data use.

[topolinik]

Update: things would be better if your laptop has decent thermal design -- you get a hair-dryer instead, which is more useful in modern days

Useful... provided you still have your hair to dry!!!

[topolinik]

But yeah, there's something exciting about storing a feature length 720p movie at CD-ROM sizes.

I tend to agree, yet I must admit I can't say why.
It must be some nerdy breeze to spend some hours on doom9, then tweaking encoding options and then waste further days into encoding comparisons.
At that point, watchin' movies is just superfluous.

[curfew]

0.5x the size means 2x the complexity.

No it doesn't. To make it more complicated than simple maths, "visual quality" is a human-optimized metric and not very exact. Two pictures might be of equal visual quality yet every pixel might have a different value, and the algorithms behind the compression might be totally different. There simply is no basis for your claim especially since we're talking about lossy compression and unexact metrics.

[rastersoft]

MP3 was brilliant when released. Even today it's still hard to beat.

Cof, cof... Vorbis... cof, cof...

[rickst29]

Could you describe what the differences sound like? Is there a perceptible signature for each codec (at higher bitrates), so you can tell them apart?

Yes, I'll describe the differences which I hear on the most "damaged" instruments. The one I complained about most was MP3, at it's highest "standard" bit rate of 320kb/sec. I am a pro musician, now elderly, and I would have noticed even bigger differences 10 or 15 years ago - my ears are now somewhat damaged.

It's less a perceptible signature for each codec, and more of a generic complaint that "this doesn't sound right". MP3 would NOT be a lot worse than AAC if higher bit rates were in wider use. But 3 orchestra instruments show the biggest problems with MP3 at 320kb "standard" high quality. Here are the details for those 3, which I will try to describe in detail.

With MP3, even at 320k, the most obvious difference occurs with cymbals (good ones). They lose the qualities of 'air' and 'space' which they have on real life. FLAC can mostly maintain those qualities, being compromised primarily by the quality of the microphones and speakers/headphones which you use for playback. AAC is a bit compromised in these properties, but very close to FLAC when recorded 384kb or higher. When raising MP3 bitrate to 384kb, I am still about 70% correct in guessing AAC versus MP3 samples - that's better than 2:1 accuracy in guessing, and indicates to me that AAC is a superior compression codec.

With MP3 at the highest standard rate of 320kb, a solo violin looses most of the characteristics of "woody" and "moving the air", sounding more like a synthesizer-generated tone for generic "strings". And 3rd, among the wind instruments, the oboe is the most damaged, sounding more and more "like just another clarinet" when the bit rateis pushed too far down down or the codec is "bad".

Opus, tuned for full-bandwidth music, nearly matches AAC 384Kb while using only only 256Kb bandwidth. But when When I turn it down to only 128Kb, it is slightly worse than MP3-320kb -- my ears are more aware that "this sounds like cheap stereo, rather than real life".