Yeah... video codecs are hideously complicated under the hood. In part it's due to the fact that it's a hard, complex problem and we ask the world of these codecs, and in part it's due to a history of cruft and bad design decisions, politics, patents, etc. There's so much more going on under the hood than people realize (myself included) and the fact that any of these files play at all is kind of a miracle. An "mp4" file can mean a million different things, with a million nuanced variations to each of those things. Pity the developers that have to handle all this stuff so we can take videos of our cats and put them on instagram.
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