[astrange]

It's all made of inter prediction + intra prediction + residual coding.

There's an evolution from JPEG -> MPEG2 -> MPEG4 part 2 (XviD) -> AVC -> HEVC… where it gets more complicated over time but that's still the structure.

There's also alternative ideas like wavelets (JPEG2000) and many other minor silly ideas; almost all of them are bad and can be ignored. Which is not to say the MPEG codecs are perfect.

ML people think they can do "ML video compression" which will be a black box; I think this might work but only because calling your video codec ML means you can make your codec 1TB instead of a few hundred KB.

[nopenopenopeno]

All noted. I’ll look up the items I don’t know. Thanks.

And yeah, I didn’t mean blackbox like ML. I meant like H.264/H.265. Blackbox isn’t the right term.

[dylan604]

There are many writeup/blogs about people's experience using these codecs, and typically, I roll my eyes at just another releasing the same info. However, for someone like you, being one of the lucky 10000 TIL types, you're their target audience.

The best way to learn is to just keep encoding. Take a source file and make an output that looks good. Compare things like its filesize, macroblocking, mosquito noise levels, etc. There are PSNR and other similar type tests that will compare your output back to the original. See if you can then tweak any of the settings to improve the PSNR score without increasing the bit rate. Then, keep decreasing the bitrate to see what things you can get away with before it becomes unacceptable. You can spend a lot of time going frame by frame comparisons, but remember, 99.99999% of viewers will ever only see it in full speed playback, so don't forget to take that into consideration. Look for obvious banding from gradients. Does a 10bit encode vs 8bit improve that? Is it worth the limits from some players not being able to use 10bit? How does frame size vs bitrate affect the quality of your file?

Doing enough of these tests, you'll start to get specific questions. Those will have more easily found answers.