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Sinter — An experimental, fully vibecoded video codec built on lapped transforms and perceptual vector quantization. No deblocking filters, no legacy architecture. Achieves luma quality within 1 dB of H.264 on a fundamentally different design.

3 starsC

I successfully failed at one-shot-ing a video codec like h.264

Name: I successfully failed at one-shot-ing a video codec like h.264
Availability: InStock
Author: bushido

by bushido·Apr 4, 2026·9 points·3 comments

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AI Analysis

●●SolidWizardryBig BrainBold Bet

Patent-free codec architecture, honestly benchmarks 18.6x worse than H.264.

Strengths

•Lapped transforms eliminate blocking artifacts structurally without deblocking filters.
•~5K lines of C with 32 passing tests, fully patent-free design.
•Transparent about limitations: documents exactly which missing features cause the gap.

Weaknesses

•18.6x larger files than H.264 at comparable quality, explicitly not production-ready.
•Benchmarks limited to 256x256 test footage, real-world performance unknown.

Post Description

Read an article yesterday about the H.264 codec increasing their licensing fee by an astronomical amount.

And as always, my first shot was how hard could it be to try and build a codec which could be that efficient.

I've personally been on a drive to improve my ability to one-shot complex features, products, or make even surgical changes. It's been a few months since I've been doing that, and honestly, results have been great for both work and work/life balance.

This was a fun experiment. It burned through tokens, but it helped me identify some more improvements I could make to my one-shot agent teams/swarms, notably in the area of brevity and creating a testing rubric when dealing with domains I don't have prior knowledge in.

Ultimately, I did not achieve the compression that I hoped I would, but it was fun seeing the swarm discuss it amongst themselves.