x264 Was Developed on Touhou

x264 was developed on touhou This tune is optimized for footage with extremely rapid motion. The lead developer of x264 at the time, Jason Garrett-Glaser (DarkShikari) got interested in video encoding from the anime scene and used Touhou game play footage to stress-test x264's motion estimation and adaptive quantization (AQ) algorithms. In fact, many devs used it for testing the software. From #x264 IRC logs: i> also, GCI students, feel free to hang out in #x264 i> where we discuss a wide variety of topics that are, in fact, totally x264- i> like touhou and starcraft dentally i have touhou music on i> I would if I wasn't watching the gomtv live starcraft stream i> what's with this high correlation between "working on x264" and "touhou"

A screenshot explains that the x264 video encoder was stress-tested with Touhou gameplay because of its extremely rapid motion. The joke is the absurdly strong association between working on x264 and listening to Touhou music or watching StarCraft, turning a technical development anecdote into a niche internet-culture joke about programmers and anime games.

• @gentoomemes / 21020 2026-06-01