What Kieran Kunhya has said about Video codecs
2 quotes · 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 Video codecs 2 times 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 roughly 45% of video files cannot be decoded on the GPU and must fall back to software decoding.
“I think it's up to 45% of files are not GPU decodable”
Lex Fridman Podcast: #496 – FFmpeg: The Incredible Technology Behind Video on the Internet (May 6, 2026) · Listen from 18:06
Kunhya said each codec generation's roughly 30% compression gain comes at one to two orders of magnitude more CPU cost.
“It's 30% better, but an order of magnitude, perhaps even two orders of magnitude more compression power”
Lex Fridman Podcast: #496 – FFmpeg: The Incredible Technology Behind Video on the Internet (May 6, 2026) · Listen from 22:50
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.
Others on Video codecs
- Jean-Baptiste Kempf · 1 quote
Kieran Kunhya on other topics
- FFmpeg · 2 quotes
- FFV1 and digital video archiving · 1 quote
- x264 · 1 quote
- Rust (programming language) · 1 quote
- Assembly language and SIMD optimization · 1 quote
- Open source maintainer burnout · 1 quote