This is an older report by Gartner that just caught our eye, but we just found the news so refreshing -- and predictable -- that we couldn't pass it up. The long and the short of the $500 report is that
H.264 has finally won the codec competition and that in the next few years everything will be encoded with it. Although this makes sense to standardize on a codec going forward, it is hard for us to imagine over-the-air broadcast TV changing from MPEG-2 in the next four years. While it is true that H.264 has been part of the
ATSC spec for a few years now, with all that equipment out in the field already it is hard to imagine much of it getting replaced again in the next 10 years, never the less the next four.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
reallynotnick @ Sep 22nd 2009 2:15PM
I love H.264, best codec out there as of now. I am pretty disappointed to see so much in the way of live TV use Mpeg-2 for encoding, that shit is old as hell.
By 2013 I will be ready for H.265 or something though, lol
Charles @ Sep 22nd 2009 2:46PM
Well, H.265 is probably still a ways off. There simply isn't enough new theory to define a new standard like there was with H.264. Instead, we'll probably see HVC as the near successor to H.264.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-performance_Video_Coding
josh @ Sep 22nd 2009 4:03PM
in 2013 h.265 will be released
New features
making consumers buy new stuff
Mike @ Sep 22nd 2009 4:07PM
Four years? No way is everyone and their grandma going to go out and buy converter boxes again within four years let alone ten years.
OTA ATSC MPEG-2 broadcasts are here to stay.
WebDev511 @ Sep 22nd 2009 7:27PM
I'm not surprised. H.264 has excellent performance in today's low bandwith/low bit rate consumer products (cell phones, iPod touch, over compressed cable, etc) and doesn't drop off until you get well past the max bit rate of Blu-ray. By the time we start talking about 4k, we'll also be talking about new round of codecs.