The technology operates as a lossy compression format across everyday hardware, including smartphones, drones, security cameras, and Blu-ray discs. By dropping subtle information like laptop speaker grill textures, the codec preserves essential bandwidth while keeping image degradation largely invisible without zooming. For instance, a 300-frame video of a webpage requires merely 175 kilobytes, whereas a single lossless PNG screenshot of that exact page consumes 1,015 kilobytes.
Key points
Lossy compression achieves dramatic bandwidth savings by removing visual elements that us…: Lossy compression achieves dramatic bandwidth savings by removing visual elements that users rarely notice.
Decades of technological development have positioned this standard across internet video,…: Decades of technological development have positioned this standard across internet video, drones, and consumer mobile devices.
The format sacrifices bit-for-bit accuracy to make full-motion high-definition video viab…: The format sacrifices bit-for-bit accuracy to make full-motion high-definition video viable on modern storage media.
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H.264 is a video compression codec standard. It is ubiquitous - internet video, Blu-ray, phones, security cameras, drones, everything. Everything uses H.264 now.
H.264 is a remarkable piece of technology. It is the result of 30+ years of work with one single goal: To reduce the bandwidth required for transmission of full-motion video.
Technically, it is very interesting. This post will give insight into some of the details at a high level - I hope to not bore you too much with the intricacies. Also note that many of the concepts explained here apply to video compression in general, and not just H.264.
Why even compress anything?
A simple uncompressed video file will contain an array of 2D buffers containing pixel data for each frame. So it's a 3D (2 spatial dimensions and 1 temporal) array of bytes. Each pixel takes 3 bytes to store - one byte each for the three primary colors (red, green and blue).
1080p @ 60 Hz = 1920x1080x60x3 => ~370 MB/sec of raw data.
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