Archive

Every piece on the site, in the order the sections run.

Eighteen pieces · six sections
Piece	Section	Length
A whole film on one disc, and a codec that was never meant to ship	Codecs	Long
The open-source answer had to be written twice	Codecs	Medium
H.264 is still everywhere, and that is the achievement	Codecs	Long
AV1 was built to be free, and free took years	Codecs	Medium
AVI held things it was never designed to hold	Containers	Long
Matroska was designed for exactly what AVI could not do	Containers	Medium
MP4 came out of a committee and won anyway	Containers	Short
One person's editor became everybody's	Tools	Medium
FFmpeg is the layer under almost everything else	Tools	Long
HandBrake put a front end on the difficult part	Tools	Short
Bitrate against resolution, and something has to give	Trade-offs	Long
A keyframe is expensive and you need them anyway	Trade-offs	Medium
Encoding an encode is always worse	Trade-offs	Medium
MPEG-2 was good enough because the disc was big	Generations	Medium
HEVC arrived tangled in more than one patent pool	Generations	Long
The disc stopped being the unit of measurement	Generations	Medium
One person's hack, and the company that grew on top of it	People	Medium
Xiph kept building formats nobody had to license	People	Short