Some do. I bet lots of companies miss out on massive cost savings like this simply because nobody at the company has the skills and access to improve things.
I heard a story - years ago Google hired an engineer who happened to be an expert from a previous life in video codecs. He wasn’t working on YouTube at Google, but out of interest he pulled up the YouTube source code to see what it did. They were just using the defaults for some of the encoding parameters. He tweaked a few of the encoding parameters and in doing so saved Google millions of dollars per year in compute/storage/network traffic. A few hours of his work was probably more beneficial for Google than years spent in his primary role.
And if tuning opportunities like this abound at Google, you know they’re everywhere. It’d be much better if Linux distributions simply shipped kernels which are already compiled with PGO, with a reasonable profile based on normalish use.
That could've happened because of pointless detuning - x264 comes with good defaults for everything, but then ffmpeg on top of it used to set everything to "off" no matter what it was, and they were probably using the ffmpeg settings.
The correct answer would've been for ffmpeg to not ship that way.
Anyway, I am an expert on video codecs just like that guy is, and I said what I said ;)
Probably, but there are many smaller outfits that probably don't because they have a server fleet of "only" a few dozen servers or so. The cost savings for those won't be in the millions, but having to purchase ~5% fewer servers is still a pretty good win.
