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I find it odd that this is a kind of mathematical article but doesn’t use the existing terms in codec literature - why does it say “cost/benefit” instead of “rate/distortion”?

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Because FB doesn't care about rate or distortion, they care about cost to them and whether the result meets some minimum standard of acceptability.

Cost is the rate. Acceptability and distortion are the same thing (although the curves are different).

In the article, cost is cpu time, and benefit is file size reduction multiplied by number of times watched.

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