[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH] doc/faq: replace "Mo" with Bytes

[Werner Robitza]

On Mon, Sep 18, 2017 at 5:06 PM, Nicolas George <george at nsup.org> wrote:
>
> Le jour du Génie, an CCXXV, Werner Robitza a écrit :
> > Replaces French "Mo" with "Bytes".
> >
> > Signed-off-by: Werner Robitza <werner.robitza at gmail.com>
> > ---
> >  doc/faq.texi | 5 +++--
> >  1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
>
> No. "Octet" originated from French but has been imported to English
> because "byte" causes a lot of confusion with "bit". RFCs and other
> texts where accuracy matters have started to adopt it since long ago
> (although not all of them did consistently, of course). With audio-video
> tools, the confusion with bits is quite frequent, that makes a good
> reason to take all steps to avoid it.

Hum, okay. Didn't think this was a conscious decision. I frequently
see speakers of French using "Mo" without knowing that (most of) the
rest of the world barely has an idea what this is. And I do understand
that octets are used in networking and RFCs – but then as "octet" –,
and that you may want to avoid ambiguity.

But this is literally the only place in FFmpeg's documentation where
this abbreviation is used, with more than 50 mentions of "Byte" in
http://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-all.html alone. So… is "-probesize" is doing
something special?