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Because society results in companies being incentivized to babysit users rather than cutting off those who are unable to learn simple technical skills like opti

by devit 5y ago

Because society results in companies being incentivized to babysit users rather than cutting off those who are unable to learn simple technical skills like optimally encoding a video respecting a maximum bitrate requirement.

acdha 5y ago
What about cutting off those who condescend others without recognizing the limits of their own understanding? I’m not an expert in this but I know that “optimally encoding a video” is an actual job. That’s because there’s no global definition of optimal (it varies depending on the source material and target devices, not to mention the costs of your compute, bandwidth, and time); you’re doing it multiple times using different codecs, resolutions, bandwidth targets, etc.; and those change regularly so you need to periodically reprocess without asking people to come back years later to upload the iPhone 13 optimized version. This brings us to a second important concept: YouTube is a business which pays for bandwidth. Their definition of optimal is not the same as yours (every pixel of my masterpiece must be shown exactly as I see it!) and they have a keen interest in managing that over time even if you don’t care very much because an old video isn’t bringing you much (or any) revenue. They have the resources to heavily optimize that process but very few of their content creators do.
giantrobot 5y ago
> simple technical skills like optimally encoding a video respecting a maximum bitrate requirement. This is in no way a "simple skill" as maximum video bitrate is only one of a number of factors for encoding video. For streaming to end users there's questions of codecs, codec profiles, entropy coding options, GOP sizes, frame rates, and frame sizes. This also applies for your audio but replacing frame rates and sizes with sample rate and number of channels. Streaming to ten random devices will require different combinations of any or all of those settings. There's no one single optimum setting. YouTube encodes dozens of combinations of audio and video streams from a single source file. Video it turns out is pretty complicated.

by devit 5y ago

acdha 5y ago

What about cutting off those who condescend others without recognizing the limits of their own understanding? I’m not an expert in this but I know that “optimally encoding a video” is an actual job. That’s because there’s no global definition of optimal (it varies depending on the source material and target devices, not to mention the costs of your compute, bandwidth, and time); you’re doing it multiple times using different codecs, resolutions, bandwidth targets, etc.; and those change regularly so you need to periodically reprocess without asking people to come back years later to upload the iPhone 13 optimized version. This brings us to a second important concept: YouTube is a business which pays for bandwidth. Their definition of optimal is not the same as yours (every pixel of my masterpiece must be shown exactly as I see it!) and they have a keen interest in managing that over time even if you don’t care very much because an old video isn’t bringing you much (or any) revenue. They have the resources to heavily optimize that process but very few of their content creators do.

giantrobot 5y ago

> simple technical skills like optimally encoding a video respecting a maximum bitrate requirement. This is in no way a "simple skill" as maximum video bitrate is only one of a number of factors for encoding video. For streaming to end users there's questions of codecs, codec profiles, entropy coding options, GOP sizes, frame rates, and frame sizes. This also applies for your audio but replacing frame rates and sizes with sample rate and number of channels. Streaming to ten random devices will require different combinations of any or all of those settings. There's no one single optimum setting. YouTube encodes dozens of combinations of audio and video streams from a single source file. Video it turns out is pretty complicated.