Video codecs
Subject in Technology
Video codecs has come up in 1 episode across 1 podcast in TMT, including Lex Fridman Podcast. 2 people have made recorded remarks about it.
What people said
Kieran KunhyaBritish codec engineer, longtime FFmpeg contributor, founder of Open Broadcast Systems and the person behind the FFmpeg account on X
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
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
Jean-Baptiste KempfFrench software engineer, president of VideoLAN and lead developer of VLC media player
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
Podcasts
- Lex Fridman Podcast · 1 episode
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.