Wow. The MP3 decoder that just appeared on HN ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18046114 ) is impressive enough, this is even more amazing --- especially given the fact that the standard doesn't detail how encoding works, only decoding.
The fact that a single person can write a working H.264 encoder is very inspirational, in the same way as tiny C compilers and the like --- writing software which is commonly thought of as being impossible for a single person to accomplish in a reasonable amount of time really gives a better idea of the actual minimal complexity to those studying such software.
The fact that a single person can write a working H.264 encoder is very inspirational, in the same way as tiny C compilers and the like --- writing software which is commonly thought of as being impossible for a single person to accomplish in a reasonable amount of time really gives a better idea of the actual minimal complexity to those studying such software.