What Jean-Baptiste Kempf has said about Video codecs

1 quote · 1 episode · May 6, 2026

Jean-Baptiste Kempf, French software engineer, president of VideoLAN and lead developer of VLC media player, has been quoted on Video codecs once in 1 episode of Lex Fridman Podcast, most recently on May 6, 2026. Each quote below is verbatim and links to the moment it was said.

In their words

Kempf argued that video and audio compression is designed around human perception rather than lossless data reduction, which is why YUV is used instead of RGB.
“all the compressions that we do, and that's very important, people forget about that, is to be viewed by humans”
Lex Fridman Podcast: #496 – FFmpeg: The Incredible Technology Behind Video on the Internet (May 6, 2026) · Listen from 20:04

Episodes

#496 – FFmpeg: The Incredible Technology Behind Video on the Internet
Lex Fridman Podcast · May 6, 2026 · 4 h 24 min
Jean-Baptiste Kempf and Kieran Kunhya explain FFmpeg, VLC, video codecs, handwritten assembly, open-source maintainer burnout and the Google security drama with Lex Fridman.

Others on Video codecs

Kieran Kunhya · 2 quotes

Jean-Baptiste Kempf on other topics

FFmpeg · 3 quotes
VLC media player · 3 quotes
Video patents and patent pools · 1 quote
Kyber (low-latency streaming SDK) · 1 quote
Open source maintainer burnout · 1 quote
Rust (programming language) · 1 quote
AV1 · 1 quote
dav1d · 1 quote