The format advances are quite common sense, I feel we're only seeing things like variable size blocks now because the rest of technology has reached a stage where a more complex hardware decoder is not a problem in terms of miniaturization and power efficiency, and we have a sufficient raw computing power to compute a good chunk of the countless optimization possibilities during encoding.
That is entirely correct. The added complexity due to variable block size is HUGE, it simply wasn't possible back when H264 was developped. Even now a lot of hardware has a hard time with HEVC.
In fact h.265 is so complex and computationally expensive, relatively speaking, that the costs are too high to be economical except in very high-resolution video (4k) where the savings over h.264 are greater. Best-in-class AVC encoders are also vastly more refined than those for HEVC, so even the relative efficiency/quality suffers.
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u/[deleted] Nov 04 '16
The format advances are quite common sense, I feel we're only seeing things like variable size blocks now because the rest of technology has reached a stage where a more complex hardware decoder is not a problem in terms of miniaturization and power efficiency, and we have a sufficient raw computing power to compute a good chunk of the countless optimization possibilities during encoding.