SVT-AV1 is pretty amazing. This mp4 file was converted from a 35mb one using fast encoding. Some quality reduction is inevitable for a conversion this quick, but it's very impressive nonetheless.
>>/test/1038

>>3112
The naming of av1 vs avc1 confuses me every single time.

I don't like webp because it can be lossy and Google made it. PNG is lossless all the time and Google didn't make it.

>>3114
I don't care who made some technology, as long as it's useful. Guaranteed lossless is nice. One use case I can see webp being undeniably useful for is scaled downed thumbnails. Since there's down scaling, loss is unavoidable, but it's way better than jpg and has a smaller file size too.

SVG is a cool, but underutilized format. The most appealing feature to me being that it's possible to have text within an SVG image be directly copyable. It would be really useful for stuff like tables and graphs because of that, but there isn't any program that makes creating those simple, while also preserving text(inkspace is art focused, and google drawings doesn't do the latter). Pretty much any monochromatic art would also work as one, but it hasn't caught on anywhere except the logo space.

Post edited on 27th Apr 2023, 2:39pm

Might as well expand the scope to storage formats. Just yesterday, I found out about M-DISCs, a disk format that can supposedly last 1000+ years, depending on the storage conditions. It's the longest-lasting, commercially available form of storage(that I know of).

For those interested in data preservation(which I would think is most people here), isn't this enticing?

The NSA made my video encoder and I dont care who made it as long as it is useful

Can we talk about forgotten formats? Formats you used to see all the time but haven't seen anymore? For me it's RMVB. I haven't come across a RMVB file since 2015. That was the last time I downloaded one. Sure, the quality was far from great, but the filesize was often very small.
I know it's not a great file format, especially if there are any other options such as mkv and mp4, but I was reminiscing about the old times, and remembered the old rmvb. I guess there is not much use for it anymore. Do you remember when you last downloaded a rmvb file?

>>3323
>Can we talk about forgotten formats?
Sure, why not
>Do you remember when you last downloaded a rmvb file?
Never heard about them until now. Being a proprietary format definitely didn't help. I'm surprised RealPlayer still gets updates.

>>3323
While browsing the site for an old Alfa System game I discovered a Japanese compression format called "LHA". It's not that hard to deal with as 7zip can open it just find but I was confused by the filetype at first.

>>3323
Not really a single file format, but plenty of tracker formats would apply, tracker music itself is not really ever entirely forgotten but eternally obscure, which is a shame cause probably 80% of music could be made in it with little difference but significant benefits, I suppose I can understand the extra workflow being enough of a deterrent if your music uses recorded audio for 80-100% of the song, but if it's mostly synthetic with maybe 1 or 2 samples there's no excuses.

>>3325
LZH is what I remember as the old jp compression format. Likewise associate it with games as one of my favorites was packaged in it. Here it is, contained as an archive in an archive (Windows).

>>3326
>tracker formats
You knew a keygen was going to be quality when it played chiptunes. Does the warez scene still bother doing those, last i checked most of the big players stopped releasing things.

>>3327
Can't speak to it generally, I don't have enough of a sample size; I recall hearing one w/ chiptune a year or two ago and I know fiitgirlrepacks do music, but it isn't chiptune.

>>3326
From what I understand LHZ is the same format renamed to avoid some sort of overlap.

>>3328
Well repacks are... repacks, it's not much fun unless the original group [k]ing the thing is the one writing the NFO or leaving easter eggs. And non-chiptune music is lazy, the reason why I mentioned is that a lot of the keygens use modplug tracks. In fact despite a lot/all of the code being obfuscated, the modplug file is the one thing they leave in there free to copy out if you want it.

>>3324
I think at lot of it also had to do it better internet speed becoming more available in poorer countries. I think the average person who made extensive use of rmvb did so because the better alternatives needed extra megabytes/gigabytes and these would often take too long to download. From what I gather RMVB was big in the piracy scene in SEA, LatAm and eastern europe. As internet speed quality got better in these places the need for smaller sizes disappeared.
>>3326
>>3327
Interesting, never came across keygen music before.

>>3331
>never came across keygen music
demo scene has/had a lot of overlap with the warez scene

>>3332
I'm familiar with the Amiga demoscene, but I wasn't aware of the connection.

>>3331
>As internet speed quality got better in these places the need for smaller sizes disappeared.
Funnily enough, lossless compression has also massively improved. AV1 blows the socks off H264.

>>3334
but both of those are lossy compression... and a large part of the improvement is due to assumption of increased compute. You can cpu-decode h264 fairly easily on almost any computer, but cpu-decode of av1 is fairly intensive. For now hevc is probably the best sweet spot in terms of hwdec availability while retaining ability for older computers to still cpu decode.

Post edited on 1st Feb 2024, 9:56pm

>>3335
>but both of those are lossy compression
AV1 supports lossless compression, as does H265. Unless you live in a 3rd world country, I think the price of hardware that can handle AV1 playback is a non-factor.

Post edited on 1st Feb 2024, 11:53pm

Here's a site which is almost fully dedicated to figuring out how old vgm worked; most of which up until the wii/360/ps3 era was tracker/sequencer (not entirely sure on the distinction) based: https://hcs64.com/
here's a thread describing gcn music;
https://www.hcs64.com/mboard/forum.php?showthread=37639&showpage=0

and here's some cool semi-related videos: https://inv.tux.pizza/playlist?list=PLAUuU0y-_R3sVqqaQGyPbdWHXOZMpwfTo

>>3335
>>3336
Do you two see the same ratio improvements regardless of compression range or is it mainly noticeable for lossless? I still only see xh26_ used for full releases and raws, which is pretty much all I dl.

>>3337
Tangentially related. Don't know anything about tracker formats, but when trying to figure out how to listen to s98 files, I discovered a windows program called KbMedia Player that works well
https://kobarin.sakura.ne.jp/kbmedia/kbmedia.htm

>Do you two see the same ratio improvements regardless of compression range or is it mainly noticeable for lossless?
I haven't encoded enough video to make those observations. I would like more releases to at least be in h265 since smaller file sizes have no down side for me.

>>3337
The jump from h264 to h265 is fairly big, most single-episode releases go from 1GB to ~400MB. The improvement from h265 -> av1 isn't quite as big as that, looks about 400MB -> 200MB or so.

h264 releases will likely keep getting made forever since its the lowest common denominator. h265 re-encodes are fairly available.

>>3341
>h264 releases will likely keep getting made forever since its the lowest common denominator
GPUs could stop supporting it like with VP8. Sure h264 is way more entrenched, but streaming is only getting more common and faster. If you're encoding everything in AV1(or something else) to begin with because of that, there's no reason to encode things in h264 for the blu-ray release. I'd say this shift will happen within 25 years.

Post edited on 2nd Feb 2024, 11:47am

>>3342
>GPUs could stop supporting it like with VP8
I don't think vp8 hwdec ever had wide adoption in the first place? Unlikely that gpus would stop supporting h264, there is so much legacy media that it's worth it for that alone.

> If you're encoding everything in AV1(or something else) to begin with because of that, there's no reason to encode things in h264 for the blu-ray release
No one is encoding av1 but hobbyists and big streaming companies right now because encode cost is too expensive, and almost no devices support av1 hwdec. It's been about 20 years since h264 was released, now most devices can hwdec h265 and yet h264 is still popular. I doubt it will go away that easily.

I think discs are going to make a come-back, at least in the enterprise space.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_optical_data_storage
https://phys.org/news/2024-02-3d-nanoscale-optical-disk-memory.html
https://files.catbox.moe/kf9w0a.pdf

>For the first time, researchers have demonstrated that optical data storage capacity can reach the petabit (Pb) level by extending the planar recording architecture to three dimensions with hundreds of layers, thereby breaking the optical diffraction limit barrier of the recorded spots.
>The storage capacity within the area of a DVD-sized disk can reach up to Pb level, equivalent to at least 10,000 Blu-ray disks or 100 high-capacity hard drives.

>The dataset behind GPT, which includes 5.8 billion indexed web pages and occupies about 56Pb of text, would typically require a playground area of hard drives for storage.
>However, the three-dimensional nanoscale optical disk memory can shrink this space to the size of a desktop computer, significantly reducing costs. Moreover, the energy consumption of nanoscale optical disk memory is several orders of magnitude lower than traditional methods, and its lifespan can reach up to 50–100 years.

Post edited on 10th Jul 2024, 3:00pm

Nothing has replaced discs as the physical medium for software distribution, which is why even the latest Touhou game is sold on a CD. Flash drives are far more expensive per unit, so despite being even more widely compatible, they haven't filled that role.

Looking into potential successors, either they don't really do the same thing, or they aren't even close to being available. You could sell people a download code, but the only benefit of that is the developer not having to buy discs. It's mostly worse for the consumer, although if the code comes with some nice art or something, maybe uv printed, that could compensate for that.

Although pretty cheap, RFID cards don't have nearly enough storage capacity, and their longevity leaves something to be desired. The only other things I could find are material science experiments. Definitely not cheap or widely compatible.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-019-0356-z
https://www.nature.com/articles/natrevmats201670