Comment by adamzochowski | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adamzochowski | Hacker News Reader

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> The first really good video codec was MPEG-4 H.264. I remember in 2001 my housemate watching a movie on his telly — playing off a CD-R. A whole movie crammed onto a CD, encoded with DivX!

H264 didn't exist in 2001. At the time DivX was really a hacked Microsofts codec to allow encodes outside of .ASF files. This MS codec was a decent codec using standard Mpeg4 part 2 Simple Profile.

XviD was opensource effort to ditch ms hacked codec, and eventually it went to support other profiles, like ASP (advanced simple profile).

Much later some enterprising people figured that they could ride on the DivX name popularity. So they wrote own mpeg4 part2 codec and called themselves DivX LLC. Even much later this company also released h264 and h265 codecs. Hence maybe the confusion by the article author on what was used in 2001.

I was about the write similar comment.

People keep mixing up H.264 and MPEG-4 being the same thing ( As they did in another HN thread ). Divx in 2001 was using MPEG-4 Part 2 or better known as H.263. Divx also has its H.264 profile that came much later.

Anyway I am very pissed that Nokia could be allowed to do that to AVC.

And then there is next bit;

>The patent trolls were the people claiming that MP3 was “dead” in 2017 — when in fact it was finally freed, because the last patents on it had expired. MP3 is sorta mediocre, but it’s also a common baseline everyone knows how to handle. And, y’know, it’ll do.

The common baseline should be AAC-LC. It is also patent free as MP3, still being used in iTunes. You get much better quality while having practically same hardware and software support.

perhaps it should be AAC-LC, but it is MP3.

[author here] Darnit, you're right. Correction added. I guess it must have been H.263 and who knows what for sound, probably MPEG-2. But given the video was probably 320 lines at most, it should still fit on a CD if only at "wow this is possible" quality.

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