I just read at ESPN.com that one of my all-time favorite football players, Dick "Night Train" Lane, has died. I only knew of him from little bits of film, but he's the kind of player you don't forget, especially if he was allowed to tackle you. His trademark clothesline tackle (the "Night Train Necktie") was so violent that it was outlawed by the league. Not many people have earned that kind of distinction.
Effects of Handbrake presets and RF quality settings across AV1, H.265, and H.264
"Fantastic!" Every once in a great while, I dive deep down the rabbit hole of media formats and the codecs 1 that encode and decode them. Sometimes it's photos, sometimes it's audio, and this time it's video. I'm no expert in these things, but rather an enthusiast who (a) likes to create and organize digital media and (b) likes knowing that the formats I'm choosing are going to meet my present and future needs. In the past few months I've been adding Blu-ray movies to my media server. I've relied on H.264/AVC as my video format for a long time (more than a decade, maybe?), but with H.265/HEVC now pretty mainstream and AV1 emerging, I figured it was time to refresh my knowledge and get to know how these different tools might serve me. This is going to be a long post, so I'm going to take a moment here to establish the four considerations I make whenever I'm encoding media, whether it's video, audio, or photos. The four consider