Because I'm currently on winter break I've had more time to watch TV. I mostly watch reruns of old shows, usually M*A*S*H, Law & Order, Roseanne, and The Cosby Show. While the shows are great, I'm getting tired of the commercials. I'm sick and tired of advertisements for stuff that makes your teeth whiter or for electrical pads you stick to your body for purposes of massage or "exercise". At least before Christmas we had some classics, like the Clapper and Chia Pet. I don't know if this is directly related, but I was also bothered by hearing the muzak version of The Cure's "Just Like Heaven" while at the mall. Sacrilege!
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...