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qbow883 7 hours ago

Setting aside the various formatting problems and the LLM writing style, this just seems all kinds of wrong throughout.

> “Just lower the bitrate,” you say. Great idea. Now it’s 10Mbps of blocky garbage that’s still 30 seconds behind.

10Mbps should be way more than enough for a mostly static image with some scrolling text. (And 40Mbps are ridiculous.) This is very likely to be caused by bad encoding settings and/or a bad encoder.

> “What if we only send keyframes?” The post goes on to explain how this does not work because some other component needs to see P-frames. If that is the case, just configure your encoder to have very short keyframe intervals.

> And the size! A 70% quality JPEG of a 1080p desktop is like 100-150KB. A single H.264 keyframe is 200-500KB.

A single H.264 keyframe can be whatever size you want, *depending on how you configure your encoder*, which was apparently never seriously attempted. Why are we badly reinventing MJPEG instead of configuring the tools we already have? Lower the bitrate and keyint, use a better encoder for higher quality, lower the frame rate if you need to. (If 10 fps JPEGs are acceptable, surely you should try 10 fps H.264 too?)

But all in all the main problem seems to be squeezing an entire video stream through a single TCP connection. There are plenty of existing solutions for this. For example, this article never mentions DASH, which is made for these exact purposes.

bugufu8f83 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>Setting aside...the LLM writing style

I don't want to set that aside either. Why is AI generated slop getting voted to the top of HN? If you can't be bothered to spend the time writing a blog post, why should I be bothered spending my time reading it? It's frankly a little bit insulting.

piskov 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Don’t assume something you cannot prove. It was great writing

npunt 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Normally the 1 sentence per para LinkedIn post for dummies writing style bugs me to no end, but for a technical article that's continually hopping between questions, results, code, and explanations, it fits really well and was a very easy article to skim and understand.

netsharc 3 hours ago | parent [-]

It's action thriller writing for something that's in reality is super dull (my question is loaded with outdated cliches, but would you be telling a girl you're trying to impress at a party about this problem you faced of trying to push some data over the network?). I had to skim over it, like watching a YouTube video at 2x so I don't start evaluating how obnoxious the narrator is.

6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]
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mschuster91 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> For example, this article never mentions DASH, which is made for these exact purposes.

DASH isn't supported on Apple AFAIK. HLS would be an idea, yes...

But in either case: you need ffmpeg somewhere in your pipeline for that experience to be even remotely enjoyable. No ffmpeg? No luck, good luck implementing all of that shit yourself.

rezonant 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Or Gstreamer, which the article says they were using.

> DASH isn't supported on Apple AFAIK. HLS would be an idea, yes...

They said they implemented a WebCodecs websocket custom implementation, surely they can use Dash.js here. Or rather, their LLM can since it's doubtful they are writing any actual code.

They would need to use LL-DASH or HLS low latency but it's quite achievable.

rdsubhas 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Huh? This is the least LLM writing style I've encountered. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

nathan82 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's not an extraordinary claim, it's a mundane and plausible one. This is exactly what you get when you ask an LLM to write in a "engaging conversational" style, and skip any editing after the fact. You could never prove it but there are a LOT of tells.

"The key insight" - llms love key insights! "self-contained corruption-free" - they also love over-hypenating, as much as they love em-dashing. Both abundant here. "X like it's 2005" and also "Y like it's 2009" - what a cool casual turn of phrase, so natural! The architecture diagram is definitely unedited AI, Claude always messes up the border alignment on ascii boxes

I wouldn't mind except the end result is imprecise and sloppy, as pointed out by the GP comment. And the tone is so predictable/boring at this point, I'd MUCH rather read poorly written human output with some actual personality.

3 hours ago | parent [-]
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Tenobrus 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

ai detectors are never totally accurate but this one is quite good and it suggests something like 80% of this article is llm generated. honestly idk how you didn't get that just by reading it tho, maybe you haven't been exposed to much modern llm-generated content?

https://www.pangram.com/history/5cec2f02-6fd6-4c97-8e71-d509...

ozim 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

*Why are we badly reinventing MJPEG instead of configuring the tools we already have?*

Getting to know and understand existing tools costs time/money. If it less expensive or more expensive than reinventing something badly is very complicated to judge and depends on loads of factors.

Might be that reinventing something badly - but good enough for the case is best use of resources.