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All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

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Re: All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

#91

Post by bitwize »

sounds wrote: post #38
stavros wrote: 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?

1) A profound interest in programming for its own sake.

2) More money than God.

Also helps: zero fucks to give about maintaining the damn thing.

Re: All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

#92

Post by charcircuit »

sorenjan wrote: post #15

Considering how ubiquitous it is, it's a mystery how and why there's so little documentation about how to use the library versions libavcodec and libavformat.

I agree. Unless you had a lot of domain knowledge or a lot of time with a lot of weirdly encoded media I would say that it is impossible for someone to make something as seemingly simple as a thumbnail extractor with those libraries (eg. take the first frame or x seconds of a video and write an image file)

Your best bet is to just call ffmpeg to do what you need and not have to worry about the weirdness of the libav stuff.

Also, stuff like parsing a buffer of memory requires you to write a file driver since the code for libav is tightly coupled to ffmpeg which only handles files and not buffers.

Re: All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

#93

Post by ollifi »

I’m using ffmpeg to transcode files. My users give feedback that it is really slow. At first I thought they are wrong as I believed ffmpeg is as fast as it gets, but sure enough after testing transcoding (prores -> h264) is many times slower than using resolve, silverstack, compressor etc. I get asked all the time can’t we just swap to using something else, but this ffmpeg monoculture means there seems to be no alternative.

Re: All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

#94

Post by aspyct »

ollifi wrote: post #93

I’m using ffmpeg to transcode files. My users give feedback that it is really slow. At first I thought they are wrong as I believed ffmpeg is as fast as it gets, but sure enough after testing transcoding (prores -> h264) is many times slower than using resolve, silverstack, compressor etc. I get asked all the time can’t we just swap to using something else, but this ffmpeg monoculture means there seems to be no alter…

Doesn't ffmpeg support hardware encoders like Nvidia's nvenc or Intel's idontrememberthename? Aldo AMD, most likely.

I know Handbrake supports it, as I used it for my productions in the fast. And I think handbrake uses ffmpeg, maybe?

Re: All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

#95

Post by jackac »

lazylion2 wrote: post #90

Interested to know what Twitch is using, they did a two part blog where they explained how ffmpeg was too slow, so they developed their own.

From sifting through the leak, it was a fork of ffmpeg they converted to C++, but still retains ffmpeg naming/structures. They dropped any code they didn't use also, so it isn't very much code.

Re: All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

#97

Post by laumars »

rurban wrote: post #72
kiwijamo wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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... err…

Yes. On Windows actually :) Debian is not the best maintained distro.

Debian doesn’t use pacman. Odds are it was Arch (though pacman has been ported to other platforms).

Re: All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

#98

Post by marcan_42 »

ellis0n wrote: post #66
marcan_42 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is conflating two very different issues. While ffmpeg certainly has its share of vulnerabilities in part caused by it being an old and crusty C project, that has little to do with video glitches. Video glitches are usually caused by corner cases in decoding, e.g. issues with reference frames during seeking. Those are logic errors, which any project handling video formats would be prone to because video codecs ar…

This is a code audit issue. Video codecs and drivers are a niche and are extremely protected by patents. The number of ffmpeg researchers and developers is very small compared to the number of lines of code, closed standards and soft/hard bugs in each series of specific video hw/sw encoders and decoders. And an AI that can analyze and validate code as complex as ffmpeg has yet to be invented.

It's a programming language issue. Any time you're writing complex format parsing code in an unsafe language like C, you're going to run into these problems. Unfortunately, Rust didn't exist when ffmpeg was created.

Patents have absolutely nothing to do with this; they don't affect the security of the resulting code.

Nobody can write code for all the formats ffmpeg supports and do it safely, in C. Nobody. You think audits work? Tell that to Infineon, who shipped a broken RSA key generator implementation. In a cryptography product. Which was audited privately. And that's a critical part of the code that should've had many eyes on it.

Perfect memory safety for C parsers for hundreds of formats? Yeah, not going to happen. It has nothing to do with the code quality of ffmpeg. It's just not humanly possible to get this right in every instance.

Re: All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

#99

Post by ncmncm »

sekao wrote: post #43
sounds wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Anyway we know Elena Ferrante is two people.

Re: All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

#100

Post by bartvk »

kergonath wrote: post #77
Zababa wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's maybe some insight to be gained by analyzing the commits to see if the code seems to be made by different people. I remember that there was the same theory about a very prolific person on the npm/js ecosystem.

Mate, it was a joke. Nobody seriously think he is several people.

Maybe but I still like their idea about analyzing git commits.
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