The main reason for that is the maximum block size of 16x16 pixels, which gives away a lot of optimization headroom once you exceed a certain pixel count. This wasn’t exactly a development the ITU anticipated in the early 2000s and so H264 doesn’t compress high-resolution video particularly well. We now have widespread distribution of 1080p videos and any higher range smartphone can already record 4K videos without a problem.
Of the many things that have changed about the video data itself since 2003, resolution has to stand out the most.
I will outline a few of them and link to more in-depth information in case you want to get a deeper understanding of how the two standards work under the hood. While this is technically not required reading for what we are about to do, it is worth briefly talking about the various improvements H.265 provides over H.264. Of course it is true, that new isn’t always better, so I quickly want to make the case as to why you should want H.265 over H.264.
Luckily, its more efficient successor HEVC/H.265 has been around for a few years now and, ever since its initial draft in 2013, has seen continuously improved support by device manufacturers, to the point where even low-end smartphones these days have a hardware decoder for the codec. While that codec was a huge leap in compression ratio and encoding efficiency compared to MPEG2, the initial draft of the standard was released all the way back in 2003.Īnd while there have been plenty of revisions on it since, the underlying format is arguably dated. Most videos these days, whether they are recorded with phones and DSLRs or downloaded from the internet are still encoded with the AVC/H.264 codec.
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