>what the BD acronym in “BD rate” stands for,

Bjontegaard Delta-Rate (BD Rate) metric, proposed in 2001 by Gisle Bjontegaard, is a method for calculating the average difference between two rate-distortion (RD) curves.

It is extremely common in codec comparison, along with terms like PSNR, SSIM and VMAF ( which is newer and developed by Netflix so it tends to get explained a bit more )

>’m certainly curious if this is aimed at becoming the new default format for Apple devices.

I certainly hope not. Not unless it is deterministic and much much higher quality.

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qarl 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> I certainly hope not. Not unless it is deterministic and much much higher quality.

You're not comparing fairly. The author is intentionally using low-res images to illustrate how the compression works. You should compare these to, say, a JPEG compression at the same resolution and same bitrate. I think you'll find that this technique is quite an improvement to the compressions you already know and love.

	▲	mrob 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		JPEG has the great advantage that all JPEG artifacts look like JPEG artifacts. Newer codecs create artifacts that can be mistaken for part of the original image. That's a heavy price to pay for improved compression efficiency.