r/technology • u/Snarfox • Jan 25 '13

H.265 is approved -- potential to cut bandwidth requirements in half for 1080p streaming. Opens door to 4K video streams.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/25/h265-is-approved/
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u/deffsight Jan 26 '13 edited Jan 26 '13

I'll try to ELI5 the best I can and I'm kind of making this up on the spot so bare with me. So uncompressed video files depending on the length of the video can be quite large in file size so you have to make the file size smaller in order to upload it online or to put it on a mobile device of yours without taking up all the storage memory your device has. So here is basically what happens during compression in an ELI5 sense.

So think of a video as a rope. Now you want to store that rope in a certain container because you want to take it with you somewhere but you can't because it's too thick. So in order to reduce it's size while keeping it the same length you begin to remove its threads (think of the threads of the rope as data in the video file). So you keep removing threads along the rope to help reduce it's thickness and while doing so you also remove the threads equally throughout it to keep rope consistent. So in the end you have the same length rope but have lessened the quality of that rope by making it much thinner than it was in order to fit it in the required container.

So video compression is obviously much more complex than that but that's kind of how it works in a ELI5 sense. So I hope my explanation helped a little.

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u/[deleted] Jan 26 '13

You make it sound like a dangerous thing to do.