In the golden age of prestige television, we talk a lot about bitrates. We obsess over 4K Dolby Vision, scoff at buffering wheels, and debate the "film grain" preservation of a 1080p Blu-ray versus a Web-DL. But rarely do we stop to praise the unsung tactician running the show: the codec.
But libvpx handles the optical flow of Episode 4 with surgical precision. el presidente s01e04 libvpx
In S01E04, the director of photography employs a specific technique: shallow depth of field with constant, slow camera movement . There are no quick cuts during the interrogation scenes. The camera drifts. In legacy H.264 encoding, drifting motion destroys bandwidth. Macroblocks shatter. The picture turns into digital confetti. In the golden age of prestige television, we
Take the 14-minute mark. Jadue (the excellent Alejandro Goic) is staring out a window. The reflection of neon lights blends with his face. A lesser codec would produce "banding"—those terrible horizontal lines in the gradient of the sky. Watch it again on a proper libvpx stream. The gradient is smooth. Not because the bitrate is astronomical (it isn't), but because libvpx’s segmentation algorithm has identified the face, the reflection, and the sky as three separate planes of motion . Episode 4 is 48 minutes long. In raw ProRes, that’s roughly 150GB. To get it to your living room over a 15Mbps connection, the encoder has to be ruthless. But libvpx handles the optical flow of Episode
If you watched this episode and didn't notice the compression, the codec won. If you watched this episode and thought, "That rain looks crisp," the codec won. Technical Rating: 9/10 for libvpx implementation. Slight demerit for a single frame of ringing artifact around Jadue’s tie clip at 41:05. Narrative Rating: 8/10. The sting operation is satisfying, but the pacing lags in the second reel.
The show is about corruption hidden in plain sight, about compressing vast amounts of illegal money into clean briefcases. Libvpx is about compressing vast amounts of visual data into clean packets. Both are trying to fool the observer into missing the seams.
Then, marvel at the fact that an open-source library (libvpx) managed to make the corruption of international football look this flawless.