“Mother,” he announced, standing in front of the television with a laser pointer he’d borrowed (without asking) from Dr. Sturgis, “I have taken the liberty of re-encoding tonight’s feature presentation using High Efficiency Video Coding, or HEVC. This will reduce the file size by approximately 52% while maintaining perceptual visual quality.”
George Sr. stared at the black screen. “So the pig is dead?”
“The pig is not dead,” Sheldon said. “The pig is trapped in a buffer overflow loop. It will remain frozen mid-squeal until we upgrade the firmware or, more logically, purchase a new television.” young sheldon s04e14 hevc
“That’s the problem,” Sheldon said. “DVDs use MPEG-2, a codec from 1995. The inefficiency is physically painful to me. So I transferred the film to my external hard drive, applied a HEVC encode at 10-bit depth, and now we can watch it in superior quality without the disc’s inevitable laser rot.”
“No,” said Mary.
Sheldon, however, had a different priority: video compression.
Then the television froze.
Then the screen went black, save for a blinking cursor that read: ERROR: DECODE BUFFER OVERFLOW.