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Video Codecs
MPEG, H.264, AV1 — motion compensation, GOP structure, rate control
01
·Video Codecs·★ MEMBER·8 min read
Video Compression from Scratch — Motion Compensation and the GOP
Compressing thirty separate photographs a second gets nowhere near today's delivery bitrates. Why frame differencing breaks, what a motion vector actually carries, I/P/B frames and the GOP, and what CBR, VBR and CRF each hold constant — ending at the keyframe interval a delivery engineer has to choose.
02
·Video Codecs·★ MEMBER·7 min read
From H.264 to AV1 — What a Codec Generation Change Really Involves
H.264 has ruled video for two decades; AV1 arrived promising royalty-free efficiency. We unpack the transition along three axes — coding efficiency, compute cost, and licensing — and end with a practical framework for deciding which codec to ship, starting from zero background.
03
·Video Codecs·★ MEMBER·10 min read
Motion Compensation from Scratch — Where 90% of Video Compression Happens
What decides where a video codec's bits go isn't the transform or the quantizer — it's the prediction at the front door. What block matching actually minimizes, why motion vectors are not object motion, and how P/B reference structures and GOP boundaries turn into real streaming failures.
04
·Video Codecs·★ MEMBER·PAPER·11 min read
Neural Compression — The Codec That Learns
JPEG's quantization table and H.264's prediction modes were tables people worked out by hand. Neural compression hands that design job to the data instead. The two pillars — an autoencoder and an entropy model — the trick that gets around non-differentiable rounding, the hyperprior, and what standards bodies are actually arguing about on the road to JPEG AI.