Why can't HTML5 replace MP4? Or maybe?

Question

css

Hello.

I must say right away: I am not a developer or a programmer. I do outdoor advertising for digital billboards. They play MP4 video clips in 10 different resolutions. The new director came up with a great idea: why make 10 video clips when you can make one adaptive banner that will fit everywhere. Because he once saw how cool blocks are rebuilt with adaptive layout.

Actually the task is: to create a banner that will automatically adjust to any resolution, from extremely narrow and high to extremely low and wide.

Question: how to explain to a person, from a _technical_ point of view, that his idea, let's say, is not very good?
What difficulties / features / limitations / costs do you foresee from this venture?

Answer 1

It all depends on the content of the video. If this is some kind of video shooting, then you will have to use several video files of different sizes for different screens, since it is stupid to load a 4k video on a mobile phone to display it on a 360 screen.
If the video is completely prepared in the same after effects, without inserting videos, then it can be exported using the body movin plugin for the web, and then it will be possible to connect 1 script and 1 data file to the page, and all this will work and scale to any screen, clearly and beautifully.
airbnb.io/lottie/#

Answer 2

Question: how to explain to a person, from a _technical_ point of view, that his idea, let's say, is not very good?

Not all content can be displayed this way.
The web browser data format - universal, how to display it - decides and draws the end device when the source data is received from the web server i.e. markup and cascading styles.
There is almost nothing absolute on the web, everything is very, very relative.
With video clips, it's different. They are ready, filmed, in a specific resolution with a specific quality. When scaling, there is simply nowhere to get data to restore a clear, beautiful picture to its new dimensions, which are larger than the resolution in which the video was shot at all.
Run a 640x480 clip at 4K resolution and you'll see pixel art.
Run a 4K clip at 640x480 and you'll see at best a piece of a clip, at worst a slideshow of a piece of a clip, or a pixelated batch.
If we are only talking about good video clips, the content of which cannot be made, say, with SVG animation or something from the WebGL world, the rendering of which will be entirely taken over by the browser displayed in the billboard, then, alas, either a good codec and the same format or 10 videos.
And yes, you can’t escape from 10 videos, just as Google couldn’t escape. Which takes a video stream in 2k and gradually encodes it into lower quality formats, and the reason is simple:
Encoding is not fast and resource-intensive, and your content does not change over time, this is not a real-time stream where you can force "I want high-quality 480p pixel art" and YouTube will give you a low-quality video stream, and when you stream completed, YouTube itself commits itself to making some low-quality copies so that people with fewer resources can also watch it without suffering.
Look towards the mkv format with h.265 (HVEC) encoding, you may not have to make 10 clips,
there will be only one clip shot at maximum resolution, which, thanks to good compression, will scale itself into the image required by the end device.
PS I don't know what the web has to do with it, but we need tags related to video processing and codecs, where people will explain exactly why the idea is not very good or how to simply make it better.

Answer 3

Guys. Guys. Guys. I understand that you are all passionate people, but either you are too carried away, or the topic is too specific, or I don’t know how to formulate. You start telling me "how to do it", although the question was "why not to do it".
First. There is no talk of any 4K. Just because the screen is big doesn't mean it's sharp. The screen hanging on the facade, the physical size can be, for example, 12x7 meters, but the resolution is not even FullHD, but miserable 576x384.
Second first. Rollers/banners in HTML5 will be used not for the web, but for street advertising. Tags about the web, because adaptive layout.
Once again: an effective manager came with a "brilliant" idea. It is necessary to clearly explain why the idea will not burn out. My arguments so far are:
- Content created in After Effects cannot be recreated in Google Web Designer or Adobe Animate. In particular:
- Limited choice of fonts
- Poorly implemented motion speed control
- Missing or poorly implemented effects
- Difficulty debugging to display correctly in portrait and landscape display
- HTML5, unlike video, takes time to load, which can cause conflict with impression counter
What else? Complement.