While golden days of vector quantisation codecs seem to be over (Cinepak, Smacker and such) there’s still one quite widespread use of vector quantisation in video — texture compression. And, surprisingly, there’s a couple of codecs that employ texture compression methods (good for GPU acceleration, less stuff to invent etc.) like Vidvox Hap or Resolume DXV (which looks suspiciously similar in many aspects but with some features like LZ4, LZF or YCoCg10 compression added). I have not looked that closely at either of them but looks like they still operate on small blocks, it’s just e.g. compressing each plane 8×8 block with BC4 and combining them later.
This does not seem that much interesting to me but I’m sure Vittorio will dig deeper. Good luck to him!
P.S. I forgot — which version of Firefox comes with ORBX.js support?
I remember thinking about this approach with (what else?) the Sega Dreamcast. The DC’s PowerVR hardware (precursor of the GPU IP found in the iPhone) has an 8:1 VQ texture format (plus 2K overhead for codebook). Naturally, a codebook leveraging this format would need to layer its own (software-based) motion compensation and entropy coding on top of the VQ.
Haha ORBX.js. That hype back then.