[userbinator]

Wow. The MP3 decoder that just appeared on HN ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18046114 ) is impressive enough, this is even more amazing --- especially given the fact that the standard doesn't detail how encoding works, only decoding.

The fact that a single person can write a working H.264 encoder is very inspirational, in the same way as tiny C compilers and the like --- writing software which is commonly thought of as being impossible for a single person to accomplish in a reasonable amount of time really gives a better idea of the actual minimal complexity to those studying such software.

[01100011]

Encoding can work however you like. The important thing is that the output complies with the standard.

It's nice to have a reference implementation, but it's not like that's the only way it can be done.

[userbinator]

The important thing is that the output complies with the standard.

That's a good point --- you can write an H.264 encoder that doesn't compress at all, and as expected, the amount of code to do so is quite small:

https://cardinalpeak.com/blog/worlds-smallest-h-264-encoder/

However, minih264 may currently be the smallest encoder that does compress.