Spoiler Warning: This post discusses plot points from Young Sheldon Season 7, Episode 7, “A Proper Wedding and Skeletons in the Closet.”

Cue the laugh track (or the knowing groan from anyone who works in streaming infrastructure). Here is where it gets brilliant. In the Young Sheldon universe, this episode takes place in 1994 or 1995 . But in our real world, OpenH264 didn’t exist until 2013.

Let’s break down what happened and why Cisco Systems just became a Young Sheldon character. In the episode, Sheldon—now a budding teenage genius navigating life at East Texas Tech—is seen furiously typing on his clunky late-90s computer. He mutters something under his breath about “proprietary codecs” and “video compression bottlenecks.” Mary, confused as always, asks if he’s working on homework.

9/10 Rating for the OpenH264 Easter egg: 11/10 Did you catch the OpenH264 reference? Are you now convinced that Sheldon Cooper works for Cisco in a parallel universe? Let me know in the comments below.

Sheldon’s reply? “I’m trying to fix the university’s video teleconferencing pipeline, Mother. But their decoder is a mess. I’m writing a new real-time video codec from scratch. I’m calling it OpenH264.”