Can someone explain to me what problem this solves in layman's terms... How are version control systems are "impractical" for large files?
Or to put another way, what problems will I run into if I just commit large media files without using this?
Or to put another way, what problems will I run into if I just commit large media files without using this?
Centralized version control systems such as Subversion don't have this problem (or at least, to a lesser extent), because as a user you only download a single revision of each file when you check out the repository.
Extensions like git-media, git-fat and now git-lfs solve this issue by only storing references to large media files inside the Git repository, while storing the actual files elsewhere. With this, you will only download the revision of the large file that you actually need, when you need it. It's sort of a hybrid solution in-between centralized and decentralized version control.