They should work on middle-out encoding.

They are correct in that encoding is a super geeky topic even by the standards of technology discussions.

It is fascinating to see how encoding has changed across generation. Take a relatively high bitrate source file and encode it with XviD, x265, x265 and whatever is the top AV1 codec at the same bitrate x resolution.

Not surprisingly, the biggest jump in quality will be from XviD to x264, but x265 does offer notable improvements.