Watching videos, watching online dramas, and chasing variety shows, just a few words summarize the entertainment methods of more than half of young people.
That's right, compared to text, video, as an art carrier, can output a large amount of content in a short time, and with the coordination of sound and color, it is easier for the audience to obtain satisfaction.
But I believe that many friends have encountered this situation, that is, frequent freezes and buffering interfaces, especially when the plot is at a critical moment. This feeling is very maddening.
So can this situation really be blamed on the network? The answer is not all, because, behind the network bandwidth, there is a deeper reason, that is, different video coding standards.
A variety of standards, only fast and not broken
How to solve the awkwardness of watching videos without freezing and frequent buffering, increasing the network speed is not the only way.
Because not everyone has the energy and economy to increase their network bandwidth infinitely, and streaming video platforms need to cater for different groups of people.
Let as many users as possible watch the video smoothly, so it is a better choice to reduce the size of the video and provide different image quality through encoding.
However, in the past two decades, there are not many coding standards that can become the mainstream of the world, namely H.264, H.265, and the latest AV1.
H.264
In the early days when products such as smartphones or MP4 became popular, the videos that everyone shot or saw were basically H.264 video coding standards.
This standard was officially released in 2003 and covers areas such as remote monitoring of cable TV, interactive media, digital TV, video conferencing, video on demand, streaming media services, etc.
Among them, an important point for the popularity of H.264 is its remarkable compression efficiency, which uses high-definition television programs sent by satellite transponders of this standard.
It can be increased from 1 channel to 3 channels in the past, so until today the standard configuration of various high-definition set-top boxes is still the SoC chip that supports H.264.
H.265
However, with the continuous improvement of picture quality, the disadvantages of H.264 become more and more obvious. Therefore, the current mainstream coding standard adopts the HEVC/H.265 standard officially approved by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in 2012. The full name of this standard is high efficiency. Video coding (High Efficiency Video Coding).
Now that we can watch ultra-high-definition videos smoothly through external devices such as video platforms and U disks, thanks to the H.265 encoding standard, because compared to the previous generation of technology.
The H.265 encoding standard only needs half of the original bandwidth to play videos of the same quality, effectively compressing the video volume. In addition to streaming media platforms, 4K videos shot by flagship mobile phones are now saved in this format.
AV1
AV1 is the latest open source video encoding format in the industry. It was jointly developed and developed by the Open Media Alliance (AOMedia) formed by Cisco, Google, Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, etc. in early 2018. Final draft.
The advantages of this standard are very obvious. First, it is completely open-source, which eliminates the high patent fees of using the H.265 standard and can be used by anyone. The second is a coding standard created for the Internet, which can better adapt to video platforms. Reduce bandwidth requirements.
The last important point is that the hardware requirements are not high, which reduces the threshold for use. With the increasing popularity of 4K and even 8K, AV1 is very likely to become a replacement for H.265.
At present, the AV1 format has been generally supported by the industry, among which the MediaTek Dimensity 1000 series/TV chip MT9602 and RTX 30 series of the mobile platform in terms of hardware are also supported.
Software vendors include Microsoft (Windows 10), Google (Chrome), Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Cisco, ARM, Mozilla, Netfix, Tencent, iQiyi and so on.
Demand is the only reason for iteration
In fact, as we see the continuous increase of video clarity, it is inevitable to use more efficient coding standards for iteration, but the premise is that there are enough video resources.
For example, in the first five years of the birth of H.265, because 4K resources were rare, the H.264 standard could meet the requirements for smooth video viewing, and no one would care about the encoding format.
Today, in line with the main route of "4K first, taking into account 8K", more and more ultra-high-definition videos will be shot and broadcast. Supporting the AV1 encoding standard will become the mainstream, and perhaps one day in the future, through streaming media Watching 8K video is no longer a dream.
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