Jean-Baptiste Kempf

It dominates internet video, but also other areas such as Blu-ray discs.

And Blu-ray discs are interesting because the people that make them really want the highest quality.

And there's some really cool high-end films that have been encoded, broadcasting and all sorts of other areas.

X264 was a big step change.

Because it kind of happened at the right time as well.

A lot of the development took place when HD video was coming out.

Intel Core 2 and Nihal MCPUs were getting fast.

You could do real-time video.

But the most important thing was a key sort of focus on visual metrics.

So industry and academia for 20 years before was obsessed with mathematical metrics.

So what's known as peak signal to noise ratio.

So mean squared error, logarithm of mean squared error.

And that led to tons of issues because mean squared error leads to blurring because you actually want to add a little bit of error to everything to reduce the mean squared error as opposed to having a big error.

And that led to loads and loads of blurring.

But hobbyists bucked that trend.

It was for their own personal videos, mostly animating.

So there were two things they did differently.

And there's a big iterative feedback loop with the community.

They did some stuff differently.

Two big things, psychovisual rate distortion.