Most content on the web is absurdly high quality in my opinion. And most people aren’t consuming it from a 40 inch screen where they can notice. Now what I did was a pretty silly hack job to just cut it down significantly. I dropped 2 or 3 frames per second cut the width and height in pixels down significantly and then used whatever compression my video compression app uses. So I can see the reduction in quality a bit on my phone. But as most of us are using 5 inch or less screens to do most of our scrolling it’s a fine trade off in my opinion. Think about the infrastructure here. It hurts my heart a little to know that the default resolution and quality settings being sent to image and video hosting sites, and the data consumption up and down every time someone reads a image or watches a video is sufficient for an 4K 60 inch screen. Or the publishing quality 30 inch photo graph. Could be nice if the clients could hook in a compression library with some sane defaults for mobile viewing. It could decrease the data requirements for everyone and improve user experience by being a lighter lift for any client trying to download and play content.

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That’s probably because 60fps videos are smooth. I think AV1 will make things better in that regard. AV1 encodes videos are ~30% smaller in size than HEVC and royalty free. Just like HEVC is taxing on the CPU but it should become standard as every device gets specialized extensions to decode it just as it was with HEVC.