Comment by londons_explore
Comment by londons_explore 16 hours ago
A word processor can save it's state at an arbitrary point... That's what the save button is for, and it's functional at any point in the document writing process!
In fact, nearly everything in computing is serializable - or if it isn't, there is some other project with a similar purpose which is.
However this is not the case with video codecs - but this is just one of many examples of where the video codec landscape is limiting.
Another for example is that on the internet lots of videos have a 'poster frame' - often the first frame of the video. That frame for nearly all usecases ends up downloaded twice - once as a jpeg, and again inside the video content. There is no reasonable way to avoid that - but doing so would reduce the latency to play videos by quite a lot!
> A word processor can save it's state at an arbitrary point... That's what the save button is for, and it's functional at any point in the document writing process!
No, they generally can't save their whole internal state to be resumed later, and definitely not in the document you were editing. For example, when you save a document in vim it doesn't store the mode you were in, or the keyboard macro step that was executing, or the search buffer, or anything like that.
> In fact, nearly everything in computing is serializable - or if it isn't, there is some other project with a similar purpose which is.
Serializable in principle, maybe. Actually serializable in the sense that the code contains a way to dump to a file and back, absolutely not. It's extremely rare for programs to expose a way to save and restore from a mid-state in the algorithm they're implementing.
> Another for example is that on the internet lots of videos have a 'poster frame' - often the first frame of the video. That frame for nearly all usecases ends up downloaded twice - once as a jpeg, and again inside the video content.
Actually, it's extremely common for a video thumbnail to contain extra edits such as overlayed text and other graphics that don't end up in the video itself. It's also very common for the thumbnail to not be the first frame in the video.