You are taking the raw, heavy truth of the source file (the Aviator’s Log ) and translating it into a light, portable, beautiful artifact (the x264 MP4 ). You are doing exactly what Saint-Exupéry did when he turned his harrowing crash in the Libyan desert into a timeless fable.
Saint-Exupéry stripped adjectives from his prose until only the stark, beautiful truth remained. x264 strips redundant macroblocks from its frames until only the essential visual information remains. Remember the Fox from The Little Prince ? "What is essential is invisible to the eye." saint exupery x264
You reach for the encoder. You reach for . You are taking the raw, heavy truth of
x264 is the Caudron C.600 of codecs: not the fastest, not the newest, but the one that will get you home across the desert every single time. When you run an FFmpeg command with libx264 , you set a preset . The legendary veryslow preset takes hours. The ultrafast preset takes seconds but produces a massive file. x264 strips redundant macroblocks from its frames until
x264 understands that what is essential (the story, the emotion, the visual continuity) is invisible to the eye as a data rate. The encoder uses techniques like to trick your brain into seeing depth where raw math says there should be artifacts.
You are removing the noise to find the signal.
It sacrifices the superfluous pixels for the essential experience. You might ask: If we are removing the non-essential, why not use the newer, more efficient x265 (HEVC)?