23.976, 29.97, 59.94. Nearly all of us working in video tech have encountered these oddly specific numbers more than once in our careers and can instantly recognize them as the digital video framerates most commonly used in North America (and a few other parts of the world). Million lines of code have been written by video engineers over the past decades to handle these framerates and the challenges that inevitably arise when trying to count whole frames as fractional values. So why do we go through all this trouble? Where did these strange framerates come from in the first place? Why did they prevail against saner framerates like 24, 30 and 60?

In my Demuxed talk I will dive into the history of video framerates, explain how technical design choices made by people in lab coats 70 years ago still haunt us even in the digital age – and then explain why we, the greatest streaming nerds who ever attended a Demuxed conference, have a golden opportunity to lead the entire video industry into the 21st century by embracing integer framerates and saying goodbye to unnecessarily dividing perfectly nice whole numbers with 1.001. There may even be a few FFmpeg demos to help jumpstart the revolution. This talk was presented at Demuxed ’22, a conference for video nerds in San Francisco featuring amazing talks like this one. Demuxed ’22 was made possible by sponsors like our Platinum sponsor Daily (https://daily.co) and organized by people from Mux (https://mux.com). For more information about the conference and community, see https://2022.demuxed.com.