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All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

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Re: All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

#41

FLOSS made internet video possible.

I remember the days of QuickTime, RealPlayer, and Windows Media. There were contemporary open source tools but they had zero adoption. What FLOSS made possible IMO was free Internet video, because proprietary tools were too manual and too expensive to use at large scale.

Re: All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

#42
Don't forget about gstreamer. Both FFMPEG and gstreamer are used in many production environments. That said, you also find professional codecs and transport libraries. I've worked on projects using Main Concept codecs and custom plumbing, for instance.

Re: All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

#43
post #38
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some speculate that Fabrice Bellard is actually as many as ten different people.

This comment brings me a lot of sadness and pain. I know and respect Fabrice from in person interactions. He is exactly who he claims to be. Maybe an interesting question, instead of this current line of discussion, is to find out what led to his successes? Could it be replicated?

Cálmate, my friend...pretty sure the comment was a light hearted joke.

Re: All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

#44
post #38
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some speculate that Fabrice Bellard is actually as many as ten different people.

This comment brings me a lot of sadness and pain. I know and respect Fabrice from in person interactions. He is exactly who he claims to be. Maybe an interesting question, instead of this current line of discussion, is to find out what led to his successes? Could it be replicated?

[deleted]

Re: All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

#45
post #5

The creator of ffmpeg, Fabrice Bellard, has an impressively long list of projects. Very talented developer! https://bellard.org/

Some speculate that Fabrice Bellard is actually as many as ten different people.

I hope this is wry humor and not more 10x denialism.

Re: All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

#46
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One obvious one is the audio quality of Twitter videos, or lack thereof. That one immediately told me they were using ffmpeg's AAC encoder (it's fairly obvious on piano music). Some of ffmpeg's built in codecs are great and some aren't; AAC is in the latter category. I've done some ABX tests with it and some transcoding tests and it's just not great; even at 320kbps two or three transcode cycles result in clearly aud…

For a few years, the default aac coder has been fast. But the twoloop coder is better but slower, and was made default in May 2021. Add `-aac_coder twoloop` (in older builds) and recheck.

I should do a comparison with the more recent one then; it's been a while since I first ran into this. Thanks for the pointer!

Re: All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

#47
post #38
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some speculate that Fabrice Bellard is actually as many as ten different people.

This comment brings me a lot of sadness and pain. I know and respect Fabrice from in person interactions. He is exactly who he claims to be. Maybe an interesting question, instead of this current line of discussion, is to find out what led to his successes? Could it be replicated?

How can it be funded?

I would love to work more on open source.

Re: All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

#49
post #38
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some speculate that Fabrice Bellard is actually as many as ten different people.

This comment brings me a lot of sadness and pain. I know and respect Fabrice from in person interactions. He is exactly who he claims to be. Maybe an interesting question, instead of this current line of discussion, is to find out what led to his successes? Could it be replicated?

> I know and respect Fabrice from in person interactions. He is exactly who he claims to be. Maybe an interesting question, instead of this current line of discussion, is to find out what led to his successes?

While I think the GP was a joke, you ask an interesting question that I tried to answer 12 days ago on this very site. [1]

tl;dr: I'm not fast, but I'm getting faster because I understand my entire codebase. I think that may be a good portion of Mr. Bellard's success, or if it is not, it may be the best way for mere mortals to emulate his success.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29533412

Re: All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

#50

Don't forget about gstreamer. Both FFMPEG and gstreamer are used in many production environments. That said, you also find professional codecs and transport libraries. I've worked on projects using Main Concept codecs and custom plumbing, for instance.

Genuine question: Are there any actual examples of giant companies using gstreamer?

Why I ask is that pretty much the only reason I have gstreamer installed on my pesonal laptop is to satisfy certain GNOME dependencies (due to GNOME, understandably, dogfooding its own stuff). Everything else (including apps I use daily e.g. mpv, Firefox, etc) depends on ffmpeg.

  $ sudo pacman -Rs gstreamer 
  checking dependencies...
  error: failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies)
  :: removing gstreamer breaks dependency 'gstreamer' required by cheese
  :: removing gstreamer breaks dependency 'gstreamer' required by gnome-shell
  :: removing gstreamer breaks dependency 'gstreamer' required by gst-plugins-base-libs
  :: removing gstreamer breaks dependency 'gstreamer' required by libcheese
  :: removing gstreamer breaks dependency 'gstreamer' required by webkit2gtk
  :: removing gstreamer breaks dependency 'gstreamer' required by webkit2gtk-4.1
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