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Google’s YouTube Uses FFmpeg

multimedia.cx

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Re: Google’s YouTube Uses FFmpeg

#21

Post by wcoenen »

mseebach wrote: post #18
joelthelion wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they avoid it, it's because they are not ready to share the code. Thus their using the code is pretty much useless in the first place...

There are two kinds of enhancements to consider: Enhancements that are specific to your product and enhancements that are general to the library you're incorporating. If Rails had been AGPL, every single webapp based on Rails would have to have its source code released. Now, Rails is not AGPL, does that mean that anybody using Rails (and not making their entire project open source) are "useless"? The vibrancy of the…

> If Rails had been AGPL, every single webapp based on Rails would have to have its source code released.

Platforms are a special case, where it is usually desirable to distinguish between the platform itself and stuff on top of it. That's why we have the classpath exception for Java: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classpath_exception#The_classpa...

Re: Google’s YouTube Uses FFmpeg

#22

Post by Lol_Lolovici »

wcoenen wrote: post #19
nikcub wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google won't touch or integrate anything that is GPL licensed into their own products - especially AGPL. the linux kernel in android is the only GPL code you will find from Google, and even then they got a lot of criticism from FSF folks for deciding to license modules under a more liberal license So if you are a developer and want to see your own library and code used by corporates such as Google and many others, a…

> Google won't touch or integrate anything that is GPL licensed into their own products ffmpeg is GPL, and it is being used in youtube. Isn't that the story here? > Using copyright law to force corporations and developers to become contributors and active participants in your software project is, to me, a ridiculous notion. So the fact that so many companies contribute to the Linux kernel has nothing to do with its G…

FFmpeg can also be compiled with an LGPL license so it can be linked in commercial products.

Also executing an external GPL library/binary from a commercial product (no direct linking) is not in direct contradiction with GPL terms (although it's a gray area where most companies would probably not want to go).

Re: Google’s YouTube Uses FFmpeg

#23

Post by robterrell »

MrJagil wrote: post #17

VLC is able to playback RoQ as well apparently. It was not able to skip through the video though. Also the film is 27 seconds but VLC displayed it as 1:46. In any case, VLC can handle stuff like RoQ and that is why I love it.

VLC uses libavcodec from ffmpeg for many of its codecs.

Re: Google’s YouTube Uses FFmpeg

#24

Post by etherealG »

pornel wrote: post #15
barkingcat wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would google want to reengineer and build closed sourced video converters? Especially when you need to pay multimillion dollar licensing fees to mpegla et al to even try to do such a thing.

If you touch a patented codec (in a country where software patents apply), you need to pay for patent license regardless whether you wrote the code yourself or not. Google must be paying for H.264 encoding already. > Why would google want to reengineer and build closed sourced video converters? To adapt them for their infrastructure and trade-offs. They are transcoding a lot of video. Zencoder for example modified th…

I think you can use ffmpeg to decode to a buffer (memory or disk as needed), and the re-encode from that buffer into various sizes/formats. don't think you actually need a different encoder/decoder to do that. I may be horribly wrong though :)

Re: Google’s YouTube Uses FFmpeg

#26

Post by mseebach »

wcoenen wrote: post #21
mseebach wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two kinds of enhancements to consider: Enhancements that are specific to your product and enhancements that are general to the library you're incorporating. If Rails had been AGPL, every single webapp based on Rails would have to have its source code released. Now, Rails is not AGPL, does that mean that anybody using Rails (and not making their entire project open source) are "useless"? The vibrancy of the…

> If Rails had been AGPL, every single webapp based on Rails would have to have its source code released. Platforms are a special case, where it is usually desirable to distinguish between the platform itself and stuff on top of it. That's why we have the classpath exception for Java: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classpath_exception#The_classpa...

I'd argue that ffmpeg belongs to the platform in a YouTube like usage scenario. Compare with ActiveRecord in Rails: Everything single thing your apps does depends heavily on it, yet, it's still just a piece of infrastructure.

Re: Google’s YouTube Uses FFmpeg

#27

Post by pmjordan »

tszming wrote: post #25
Andrex wrote: post #2

What else would it use? (Genuinely curious, what else is viable?) Although I think it uses libvpx for WebM, but who knows, they may have migrated to FFmpeg 0.6.

MEncoder

Doesn't mplayer/mencoder also use libavcodec (i.e. ffmpeg) for many codecs?

Re: Google’s YouTube Uses FFmpeg

#28

Post by dimitar »

robterrell wrote: post #13

I don't want to be snarky in response to an ffmpeg developer, because I love ffmpeg and respect his contributions, but still, this is not exactly news. The explosion of the entire category of "video sharing sites based on Flash" happened right after ffmpeg added FLV support. That was the missing piece -- before that, you could only convert videos to FLV using Adobe's proprietary (and expensive and crappy and GUI-base…

This is great!

I think the bigger story is how much popular web applications are dependant on open source operating systems, libraries and programs.

Re: Google’s YouTube Uses FFmpeg

#29

Post by wulczer »

Andrex wrote: post #2

What else would it use? (Genuinely curious, what else is viable?) Although I think it uses libvpx for WebM, but who knows, they may have migrated to FFmpeg 0.6.

GStreamer is another option. While support for some formats is provided in GStreamer by using ffmpeg, it has independent implementations for many formats and a very different architecture.

Re: Google’s YouTube Uses FFmpeg

#30

Post by jswinghammer »

Andrex wrote: post #2

What else would it use? (Genuinely curious, what else is viable?) Although I think it uses libvpx for WebM, but who knows, they may have migrated to FFmpeg 0.6.

You can script Sorenson Squeeze through a command line but that's expensive software and was probably not available in the form that exists today when YouTube launched.
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