Item — HN Reader

> tragic

H.264 isn't even that bad at all, if not the best depending on how you look at it. Our Internet bandwidth, both on the backend and front end on Mobile 5G is increasing with plenty more room to grow. While computation decoding and storage isn't.

i.e If bandwidth is infinite and free, and we are only optimising for decoding power usage. H.264 wins in a lot of this scenario.

1 comments

H264 is lacking a lot of features (behind patents) that are essential to real-time communications. It's available, but by far, the worst offender for call quality. Modern call technology will want to use temporal and spatial scaling which are not available in the profiles supported by most H264 encoders and decoders.

Those tools are available for VP8 (temporal only), VP9 and AV1 and improve the quality of calls quite a lot when used right. I don't know about about the internals of H265 and H266 as those are also behind patents and no one wanted to touch them in the real-time conferencing space.