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Comment by cebert | Hacker News Reader

I’m slightly confused by the title of this submission. Doesn’t this post suggest a 20% speed up on Windows devices? I don’t see Apple mentioned.

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"Apple Prores" is a codec.

Thanks for the clarification!

For more context, it's extremely popular for use in film and TV post-production, and is designed specifically for that role (as opposed to the needs of consumer-facing codecs used for disc storage or streaming).

If I remember rightly it was “Elvis Presley” who contributed the ProRes codec in the first place. Or maybe I’m thinking of a similar closed codec.

There are only a handful of people that really contribute to ffmpeg, yet its codebase runs pretty much the entire video based internet. It’s a marvel of the modern world.

You do remember rightly:

https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/commit/5554de13b29b9bb812ee...

I am always impressed by the collective memory of HN commenters.

I genuinely feel like ffmpeg is kind of like a "secret weapon".

Occasionally my dad will need some help with video or audio, and he'll see me hack together an ffmpeg command (even on Android with termux in a pinch!) and be utterly astounded. Being able to quickly slice up the video without re-encoding, or being able to stitch video together without a re-encode, or being able to arbitrarily glue a bunch of videos together all of different formats and it will work flawlessly.

It's a piece of software I would gladly pay hundreds of dollars for, and yet it manages to be free. I think I'll visit their donate page right now.

It’s amazing how many companies are literally just ffmpeg-as-a-service. It wasn’t a ton of money but I saved my last company a few hundred bucks a month they were paying a service to convert .gif files to .mp4

ImageMagick as well! At a big social media company I used to work at [1], they were spending a not-insignificant amount of money (in the millions) to their CDN/caching provider just to have images resized and converted to PNG and WebP. I am pretty sure all this CDN was doing was running the image through ImageMagick or GraphicsMagick and calling it a day, and charging absurd quantities of money to do it.

[1] it's not hard to find my employment history but I ask you not to say it publicly here

Was this an Apple employee working covertly to cement ProRes as an open codec?

Though if you used a normal codec but only output I-frames at very high quality you'd end up pretty close.

by close you mean proxy files?

No, by close I mean you'd hit the same use case and have similar attributes.

Probably not as fast but it would scrub well.

Why would only I-frames make a (positive) difference? Sure it makes decoding for seeking easier/faster but it should end up being lower quality at equivalent bitrate?

Because it's meant for editing, to be able to cut anywhere without re-encoding. So it needs to be all I-frames.

And you're going to use a very high bitrate.

This is way more space than consumer codecs use. But still way less than uncompressed video.

I’m struggling to imagine a use case for removing bits of a video and then saving that intermediate back out without editing or reencoding but if that’s what a video editing workflow calls for then fair play!

you just described pretty much every single modern day video capture. pretty much all of the dslr/mirrorless cameras are capturing a higher bitrate h.264 as source.

How would you edit a sports highlights package?

shudder, uncompressed. i have nightmares of v210

H.265/h.265 make use of IPB frames. The P and B frames refer back to the I-frame so that each P/B frame has much less information than the I. So if you use only I-frames, that's the best that codec can offer, at a decent bit rate. there's much better descriptions on the web.

That doesn’t make sense, at the same bitrate encoding frames with no dependency on previous frames can’t possibly look better or be the best the codec can offer, or there would be no reason for other frame types to exist

They didn't say "same" bitrate but rather "decent" which I take to mean "sufficient" -- and obviously much larger than what you get with lossy(er?) params

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