When you jump into a video on YouTube or Netflix, a lot happens very quickly behind the scenes. Video data is rapidly downloaded to your device, which then has to unpack and normalize that information into a smooth, hiccup-free stream. The process of encoding and decoding video data has changed greatly over the years, with H.264 (AVC) and its successor H.265 (HEVC) remaining two of the most widely used codecs for streaming.
But in 2015, tech giants including Netflix, Microsoft, Google,…
