Jean-Baptiste Kempf

The rest are de minimis, the small effects, you know, edge effects really compared to that.

So it's not the end of the world.

There are people who do get annoyed by that.

But also in reality, something like VLC, just to point out, the file may say .mp4, but it may be something completely different.

And that's one of the challenges both FFmpeg and VLC have is the real world is a completely different place to a three-letter file format.

So there's a huge amount of redundancy in any video, both spatial and temporal.

And the point of any video codec is to remove this redundant data, use mathematical properties as part of this reduction process.

So more often than not using several orders of magnitude more compute to compress, because that's more costly versus both costly, both financially and in CPU resources.

versus the decompression.

So it's asymmetric in that respect.

Often the case because compression is done once, but there could be lots of viewers of another file.

So to take that information and compress it by 100x, 200x, removing redundant information and using mathematical properties to make that small, but also have properties such as error resilience.

So as JB suggested,

VLC in the beginning was used to play UDP network feeds and UDP network feeds lose packets.

And so some of the design goals of a codec is also to be recoverable.

You need to actually be able to join a stream.

It's not necessarily a file.

You need to join, get on the decoding process and start decoding.

So just to elaborate, codecs like AV1, VVC...

have a wide audience.