What Kieran Kunhya has said about Assembly language and SIMD optimization
1 quote · 1 episode · May 6, 2026
Kieran Kunhya, British codec engineer, longtime FFmpeg contributor, founder of Open Broadcast Systems and the person behind the FFmpeg account on X, has been quoted on Assembly language and SIMD optimization 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
Kunhya said hand-written SIMD in FFmpeg yields 10x to 50x speed improvements over compiled C, not marginal percentage gains.
“when we write SIMD is we have a 10X, not percentage, 10X to 50X speed improvement”
Lex Fridman Podcast: #496 – FFmpeg: The Incredible Technology Behind Video on the Internet (May 6, 2026) · Listen from 2:09:47
Episodes
#496 – FFmpeg: The Incredible Technology Behind Video on the InternetLex 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.
Kieran Kunhya on other topics
- FFmpeg · 2 quotes
- Video codecs · 2 quotes
- FFV1 and digital video archiving · 1 quote
- x264 · 1 quote
- Rust (programming language) · 1 quote
- Open source maintainer burnout · 1 quote