Godot Version
4.7
Question
So far the only official video format that Godot supports in Ogg Theora.
It is a fully free standard, and there's implementations that work on all supported platforms. It can also run on very old hardware. I suppose these are the reasons it's still the only option.
Commercial games at large use BinkVideo. One of the features of Bink is a deblocking filter that effectively reduces compression artifacts and provides a smoother result.
I was wondering if it'd be possible to improve Ogg Theora's bang-for-bit by using a post-processing filter that'd reduce the blocking artifacts.
I've seen some crazy things done in shaders, maybe it could be possible to (at reasonable performance cost) make something that supports all target platforms and can run on low-powered hardware that'd improve the quality of played video significantly without requiring shipping and decoding 4x larger video files.
I couldn't find any trace of anyone attempting this before in Godot.
I have seen 3rd party extensions that add support for newer video codecs but I like the idea of postprocessing, because on older hardware the deblokcer could just be disabled if performance suffers too much - if you ship a video of too high resolution and bitrate for a system to decode, you can't just "lower the quality".
Shipping two versions of a video file one for low and one for high-end systems seems wasteful as well.