While funny, that's not really what I would call accurate. Users get reduced data consumption, potentially higher quality selection if the bandwidth now allows for a higher resolution to be streamed, and possibly lower disk usage should they decide to offline the videos.
Better codecs are an overall win for everyone involved.
Modern video codecs are what broke the telco monopoly on content and gave us streaming services in the first place. If the cdn bill is make or break, the service isn’t going to last.
And there’s no transfer of effort to the user. Compute complexity of video codecs is asymmetric. The decode is several order of magnitude cheaper to compute than the encode. And in every case, the principal barrier to codec adoption has been hardware acceleration. Pretty much every device on earth has a hardware-accelerated h264 decoder.
For those of us who back up media, this can be very appealing as well. I don’t disagree that what you said is a major driving force, but better formats have benefited me and my storage requirements multiple times in the past.
occz|4 months ago
Better codecs are an overall win for everyone involved.
dsnr|4 months ago
I don’t remember ever watching a movie and wishing for a better codec, in the last 10 years
calcifer|4 months ago
They also get increased power usage, lesser battery life, higher energy bills, and potentially earlier device failures.
> Better codecs are an overall win for everyone involved.
Right.
condiment|4 months ago
And there’s no transfer of effort to the user. Compute complexity of video codecs is asymmetric. The decode is several order of magnitude cheaper to compute than the encode. And in every case, the principal barrier to codec adoption has been hardware acceleration. Pretty much every device on earth has a hardware-accelerated h264 decoder.
joshstrange|4 months ago