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Old 11th June 2013, 14:57   #2  |  Link
qyot27
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Join Date: Nov 2005
Location: Florida
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I can't comment on the rest of it, but
Quote:
Originally Posted by thebombzen View Post
Also, is this move going to kill x264? It seems that does happen for software, for example, the Blender3D Cycles rendering engine effectively killed Luxrender.
IMO, probably not. One of the reasons that x264 eclipsed Xvid as quickly as it did (which still took several years; Xvid's apex period was ca. 2003-2005, with a slow declining drop-off for a couple more years after that) is because MPEG-4 ASP was never as deeply entrenched as MPEG-2, which is still used - most obviously for DVD, but also as an option on (mostly older) Blu-ray discs, and it's still widely used for DTV broadcast (although H.264 is in the process of replacing it for this).

H.264 is arguably even more ubiquitous than MPEG-2 ever hoped to be, so I'd wager it'll still take several years for HEVC to become the dominant format, and then you also have to factor in the amount of time it will take for those in the FOSS community to implement and optimize an encoder for it (that is, if development of rival formats like VP9 or Daala don't throw a wrench into the works), while it still has to compete with x264 being as long-mature as it is.

In perspective, H.264's specs arrived in early 2003, and hdot264 appeared sometime afterward. x264 appeared some time in (late?) 2004, didn't start getting a lot of attention until 2005, and H.264 as a format didn't start dominating over MPEG-4 ASP or SP until 2007 or 2008 in tangible online distribution*. The almost wholesale transition of streaming media to H.264 from the variety of formats they were using before didn't really start to coalesce until what, 2009 or 2010? I'm not really sure when MPEG-2 and VC-1 use on Blu-ray started to drop off, but it was still somewhere in there.

*take Apple and iTunes as examples: many/most of the trailers and music videos available through them prior to formally starting the iTunes Video Store were in either MPEG-4 SP (music videos) or Sorenson 3 (trailers). The Video Store explicitly moved its offered content to H.264, and it was around the same time that the trailers site both mostly moved to H.264 and started distributing 720p and 1080p versions. That's just one example (and probably the only one that matters, at least legally).

There are of course going to be early adopters that like the bleeding edge, but you've got to contend with a lot more standalones and mobile devices that support H.264 and not HEVC, which will impact its rate of adoption in the short term. Active development on Xvid didn't start tapering off until it was in its twilight years, so unless there's just this tidal wave of adoption for HEVC, I'd say that H.264 as a format - and x264 as its premier encoder - still have at least a good 5 years before HEVC's rising level of dominance begins to seriously impact it, at which time the use case will shift more to legacy support for things like disc formats or using H.264 as the 'plays on almost anything and/or not-so-powerful machines' solution that MPEG-4 ASP still manages to hold onto. The 5-year point also is likely to mirror the shift to UHDTV or a new generation of Blu-ray, where HEVC will naturally have broad use.
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