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Comment by jonpurdy | Hacker News Reader

My 2012 Mac Mini has quickly become much less useful since YouTube switched from H.264 (AVC) to VP9 for videos larger than 1080p a couple of years ago (Apple devices have hardware decoders). I've tested 4K h.264 videos and they play wonderfully thanks to the hardware.

My internet connection speeds and hard drive space have increased much faster than my CPU speeds (internet being basically a free upgrade).

So I don't appreciate new codecs coming out and obsoleting my hardware to save companies a few cents on bandwidth. H.264 got a good run in, but there isn't a "universal" replacement for it where I can buy hardware with decoding support that will work for at least 5-10 years.

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Honestly, the expectation that a 2012 computer will play 4K video seems a little unreasonable, no? 4K video virtually didn't even exist back then. I'm actually amazed it even handles it in h.264.

This isn't about saving companies a few cents on bandwidth. It's about halving internet traffic, about doubling the number of videos you can store on your phone. That's pretty huge. You can still get h.264 video in 1080p on YouTube so your computer is still meeting the expectations it was manufactured for.

It's not so much about it being able to handle 4K, but Youtube already has too low of a bitrate for 1080p (resulting in MPEG artifacts, color banding, etc). So I like to watch in 2.7K or 4K downsampled, since at least I get a higher bitrate.

The bigger problem that I didn't mention is with videoconferencing: FaceTime is hardware accelerated and has no issues with 720p, but anything WebRTC seems to prefer VP8 or VP9 codecs, which fails on my Mini and strains my 2015 MBP. Feels like a waste of perfectly good hardware to me.

Maybe you can force the YouTube web app to use the H.264 version?

https://github.com/erkserkserks/h264ify

Or is there no longer an H.264 4k version?

I have that installed and it works really well! But H.264 only goes up to 1080p on YouTube as of a couple of years ago. As mentioned in other comments, I prefer 2.7K or 4K and downsample to get higher bitrate, but this isn't possible without downloading and converting. (I only do that for the rare video where I really want the best quality; most of the time I tolerate the YouTube 1080p with h264ify).

Your 2012 Mac Mini's video output doesn't go higher than 2560x1600 anyway, so just staying at 1080p doesn't seem like a huge sacrifice.

True. I just addressed this in a reply above this one as well: Youtube already has too low of a bitrate for 1080p (resulting in MPEG artifacts, color banding, etc). So I like to watch in 2.7K or 4K downsampled, since at least I get a higher bitrate.

Can't do that anymore without either buying a new computer or youtube-dl and recompress the bigger version (which takes hours for minutes of video on my poor machine).

I first got into computers in the mid 90s. Back then, clock speeds were doubling about every 2 years. Combined with architecture improvements with each CPU generation, it really meant that computers were almost completely obsolete in less than 5 years, as new hardware would literally be over 4 times faster in all applications. So with this in mind, I find it puzzling that you'd think 8 year old hardware should still run today's software and algorithms.

But FWIW, H.266 isn't going to be in any sort of wide use for a few years. Buy something that supports H.265 and you'll probably be good for at least 5 years.

>So I don't appreciate new codecs coming out and obsoleting my hardware

You could say something similar about any other technological advance.

100%, I was worried I'd seem like an old 35-year-old man when I posted my comment. And it's true, I upgrade my hardware much less frequently than I did when I was younger.

I don't mind replacing a machine after 8 years of service, but h.265 still isn't supported by Google/YouTube, and Apple refuses to add hardware decoding for VP8/VP9, so there's no universal codec that will work as efficiently as h.264 did on my Mini and multitude of MacBooks and iPhones all this time.

Yes, there is one, it's called AVC.

Download the format you need using youtube-dl

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