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Facebook Comes Up With a Unit of Time: The "Flick"

posted by janrinok on Wednesday January 24 2018, @03:23AM   Printer-friendly
from the about-time dept.

takyon writes:

Facebook invented a new time unit called the 'flick' and it's truly amazing

So what is a flick? A flick is one seven hundred and five million six hundred thousandth of a second — 1/705,600,000 if you prefer the digits, or 1.417233560090703e-9 if you prefer decimals. And why is that useful?

As a hint, here's a list of numbers into which 1/706,600,000 divides evenly: 8, 16, 22.05, 24, 25, 30, 32, 44.1, 48, 50, 60, 90, 100, 120. Notice a pattern? Even if you don't work in media production, some of those numbers probably look familiar. That's because they're all framerates or frequencies used in encoding or showing things like films and music. 24 frames per second, 120 hertz TVs, 44.1 KHz sample rate audio.

[...] Even the weird NTSC numbers in use due to certain technical constraints divide nicely. 23.976 (technically 24*(1,000/1,001)=23.976023976230 with the last 6 digits repeating) becomes exactly 29,429,400 flicks. It's the same for 29.97, 59.94, and any others like them. No more fractions or decimals needed whatsoever! How great is that?!

There is more detail and background information on GitHub.

Do you give a flick? How many flicks do you feel you have wasted on this article?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 24 2018, @05:24AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 24 2018, @05:24AM (#626985)

    The NTSC formats do NOT evenly divide, Facebook explicitly said "fuck that legacy crap" and ignored the biggest source of existing content. Which is probably the best and only thing to do at this point, we really DO need to ditch that hack and start resetting everything to 60 or 120 frames per second.

    The solution to the problems caused by having to many different fixed framerates is not to add yet another video standard with another fixed framerate.

    The only reasonable solution to this problem is to eliminate fixed framerates on our playback systems altogether.

  • (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Wednesday January 24 2018, @07:45PM

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday January 24 2018, @07:45PM (#627333) Journal

    The only reasonable solution to this problem is to eliminate fixed framerates on our playback systems altogether.

    You're in luck. Open Handbrake [handbrake.fr] and select "Peak Framerate (VFA)" on the "Video" tab.