On: How Facebook encodes videos

[astrange]

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”?

[not2b → astrange]

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.

[astrange → not2b]

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

[pocak → astrange]

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