Top all-time · #4117
Sid Bala
Personal blog · sidbala.com · on HN as LASRprogrammingsystems
Sid Bala's personal blog at sidbala.com covers programming and systems. Since 2016, 17 different Hacker News readers have linked it 19 times, most often “H.264 is Magic”. The last post was in 2016, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (9) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog as a high-level explainer of how H.264 video compression works, including how it can shrink video while keeping good quality.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 9 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Technology Polymath
Most-linked posts?
- H.264 is Magic16 people · 17 mentions · first linked 2016-11-04
What Hacker News says?
I can also recommend this article on just how impressive H.264 at compressing a file while retaining good quality. https://sidbala.com/h-264-is-magic/
Comment linking /h-264-is-magic/
on “How does a video codec work?”Submitted H.264 is Magic as a story · 1228 points
HN discussionsee more details, https://sidbala.com/h-264-is-magic/ I know that's not fair comparison, but imaging clever compressions were not invented and you would download terabytes of data to view a small movie.
Comment linking /h-264-is-magic/
on “H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)”Submitted H.264 is Magic (2016) as a story · 714 points
HN discussionYou're thinking of "h264 is magic" https://sidbala.com/h-264-is-magic/ GREAT article
Comment linking /h-264-is-magic/
on “H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC)”Submitted H.264 is magic (2016) as a story · 680 points
HN discussionLossy compression is possible in PNG to a certain degree. This is the "same PNG", but 94 kB instead of 1015 kB: 1015 kB: https://sidbala.com/content/images/2016/11/outputFrame.png 94 kB: https://www.photopea.com/keynote.png
Comment linking /content/images/2016/11/outputFrame.png
on “H.264 Is Magic (2016)”Submitted H.264 Is Magic (2016) as a story · 524 points
HN discussionLossy compression is possible in PNG to a certain degree. This is the "same PNG", but 94 kB instead of 1015 kB: 1015 kB: https://sidbala.com/content/images/2016/11/outputFrame.png 94 kB: https://www.photopea.com/keynote.png
Comment linking /content/images/2016/11/outputFrame.png
on “H.264 Is Magic (2016)”Submitted H.264 Is Magic (2016) as a story · 333 points
HN discussionThe image for an MPEG compressed video is splitted in 16x16 blocks. For each frame (excluding the 1st of course), the compressing algorithm tries to to matchthat particular block with a block in the previous frame (it searches the previous frame to see where there are the fewest differences). If it can do it it only encodes the differences and the position in the previous frame; this is called an inter(predicted) bl…
Comment linking /h-264-is-magic/
on “PySceneDetect – A tool for detecting scenes in movies”Submitted H.264 Is Magic as a story · 18 points
HN discussionworking on FFT-transformed images is quite the dark magic if you don't understand what you're looking at; this is especially interesting when you look at what e.g. H.264 does to images in FFT: https://sidbala.com/h-264-is-magic/ (look at the 2% mask and the resulting image - it provokes a 'this shouldn't be possible' reaction).
Comment linking /h-264-is-magic/
on “Debanding the World”Submitted H.264 Is Magic as a story · 4 points
HN discussionIf you want a similar read on DCT-based encoding, I highly recommend this article which lays it out in an extremely digestible format: https://sidbala.com/h-264-is-magic/
Comment linking /h-264-is-magic/
on “Fighting JPEG color banding”Submitted H.264 Is Magic as a story · 2 points
HN discussionA good high-level breakdown of H.264: https://sidbala.com/h-264-is-magic/ Associated HN post, although there have been a few: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30710574 More technical look at video codecs in general with sources: https://github.com/leandromoreira/digital_video_introduction...
Comment linking /h-264-is-magic/
on “Ask HN: How can I learn about video encoding, h.264, ffmpeg, etc.”Submitted H.264 is Magic – a technical walkthrough as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted H.264 Is Magic (2016) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
