dropFFish 1.32
I've released another revision of dropFFish, my GUI for using FFmpeg and other CLI video encoders. If you work in MacOS and need to convert some video, you might want to give it a shot. Download it here.
Death By Video Compression
I remember when the audio CD first came out in the 80's there was this perception that "digital" was inherently a lossless format. That it was a perfect reproduction that would never degrade. That's what the marketing sold us on anyway. The problem is that it actually takes a huge amount of ones and zeros to store audio and even more so for pictures and video. And we could barely fit a little more than an hour of lossless audio in 1982. Which isn't much: about 650 megabytes. Digital video was just a dream. Laserdiscs had analog video and were gigantic. Then came one of those inventions that everybody uses but few people think about. Lossy data compression. It basically said it was ok for part of the picture or sound to be thrown away because they were the less important bits (to human eyes and ears). It made possible JPGs, MP3s, Napster, the iPod, DVD Video, YouTube and many other cool things.
But it's not without its drawbacks. Like what happens when you make a copy of a copy of a copy? What happens when you compress a video over and over again? Turns out lossy video can degrade into nothing, just like those crappy VHS tapes. Lossy video is also the bane of video editors everywhere.