One person's editor became everybody's
VirtualDub was written by Avery Lee and released free. For years it was the default way to cut and filter AVI on Windows.
3.11Alpha · late 1999
A whole film on one disc, and a codec that was never meant to ship
DivX ;-) 3.11 Alpha was a hacked build of Microsoft's MPEG-4 implementation. It made a feature fit on a CD-R, and a company formed around what followed.
Three dates decided what video looks like
1999
A hack proves the point
A modified Microsoft encoder puts a feature film on a disc that costs almost nothing, and the industry finds out afterwards.
2003
The standard everyone still ships
H.264 is ratified. Hardware decode reaches consumer silicon before the licensing argument is anywhere near finished.
royalty-free
The way out of the pools
AV1 arrives in 2018 with no toll booth, specified that way from the first draft because HEVC had turned up with several.
Two programs did most of the actual work
All of Tools →
FFmpeg is the layer under almost everything else
Most tools that claim to convert video are calling FFmpeg. It is the piece the ecosystem depends on and the piece nobody markets.
And three arguments nobody ever settled
Everything, listed →- 01
AVI held things it was never designed to hold
The AVI container came from 1992 and predates most of what people put in it, which is why variable bitrate audio and modern subtitles fit so badly.
- 02
Bitrate against resolution, and something has to give
A fixed bitrate spread over more pixels means less for each one. Every encode is a decision about where that shortage should show.
- 03
Encoding an encode is always worse
Lossy compression discards information permanently, so re-encoding compounds. The second pass cannot recover what the first threw out.
Trade-offs
A keyframe is the expensive one, and you need them anyway
Keyframes are stored whole rather than as differences. Too few and seeking breaks; too many and the file grows.