Flicks: Facebook’s New Way of Measuring Time

The 1/705600000 second chunks are helpful in media playback and digital video and audio

Facebook just created a new way to measure time, but you won’t be seeing it on your Apple Watch.

The social network introduced Flicks, which are aimed at simplifying the process for programmers and developers working with media.

One Flick is equal to 1/705600000 second, which is slightly larger than a nanosecond. However, Flicks are more useful when dealing with media playback and digital video and audio, because media frame rates can be expressed in Flicks in much rounder, more divisible numbers than nanoseconds can.

Facebook said on the Github page for Flicks, “When working creating visual effects for film, television and other media, it is common to run simulations or other time-integrating processes that subdivide a single frame of time into a fixed, integer number of subdivisions.

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