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All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

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Re: All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

#101

Post by ncmncm »

marcan_42 wrote: post #25
mwint wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely idle curiosity: What kind of artifacts? I don’t spend much time on AV stuff, but I always find the details fascinating.

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…

Why in the world are you still fooling with AAC? Everybody supports Opus now.

Re: All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

#102

Post by ollifi »

aspyct wrote: post #94
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?

Yes it does. I am using hw acceleration. This is using mac hardware so not all options are available, but the ones I have tried do not make significant difference.

Re: All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

#103

Post by ganzuul »

marcodiego wrote: post #89
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?

Intrigued by this exact question a long time ago, I took a look at some of Bellard's earlier projects. I studied a bit of a partial implementation of an OpenGL software renderer written by him. I even found a bug I could fix! Actually his first projects were not all that advanced, they are things "normal people" could do. I think key lies down to 3 points: - Start simple: do not try advanced projects at first, start…

> don't write the first function before you know what will be the last

This is some seriously deep meta-heuristics. Very insightful. Thank you.

Re: All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

#104

Post by ncmncm »

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 tried to switch from ffmpeg to libav. It didn't turn out well.

But it generally gives me no trouble.

Re: All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

#106

Post by marcan_42 »

ncmncm wrote: post #101
marcan_42 wrote: post #25

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…

Why in the world are you still fooling with AAC? Everybody supports Opus now.

Live streaming is stuck in the dark ages of RTMP with H.264 and AAC. It's basically hardcoded everywhere, there is barely any support for other codecs or protocols. You want to send streams to Twitch or YouTube, you're sending H.264 and AAC.

OBS doesn't even let you pick streaming codecs. It just assumes H.264 and AAC. You can get it to stream in other codecs by abusing the "record" function with an output to stream instead of filename, but it's a hack...

Re: All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

#107

Post by marcan_42 »

asveikau wrote: post #70
marcan_42 wrote: post #25

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…

> Windows it'll use CoreAudio if installed, but you need to install an old MSI pulled from an old version of iTunes to get that on Windows... so the vast majority of streamers on Windows are stuck with ffmpeg-AAC. I think windows might have a built in AAC encoder in media foundation? Wonder if that's true and if it's any good.

IIRC there was some attempt at supporting it but it was broken or not very good? I forget...

Re: All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

#108

Post by vanviegen »

Uehreka wrote: post #63
susam wrote: post #36

About 14 years ago, at my first job, I worked with a colleague[1] who introduced me to the wonderful world of open source: the culture, the philosophy, how to submit patches to open source projects, etc. He also introduced me to Debian GNU/Linux which I use actively to this day. One day, he began working on certain audio/video encoding problems that needed to be solved for our project. He chose FFmpeg as the primary…

Yeah, it’s been said that ffmpeg and vlc could play a vinyl record if you fed it to them. It’s not actually true, but it is story true.

What if you pass it a high-res photo of a vinyl record? There ought to be a transcoder plugin for that lying around somewhere!

Re: All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

#109

Post by jon-wood »

kiwijamo wrote: post #50
01100011 wrote: post #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.

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…

RDK is the firmware used on a wide variety of set-top boxes, routers, and IoT devices: https://rdkcentral.com/

The core media pipeline is almost all gstreamer, ffmpeg, and just because I think it’ll surprise some people, Wayland.

Re: All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

#110

Post by kaetemi »

ollifi wrote: post #102
aspyct wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes it does. I am using hw acceleration. This is using mac hardware so not all options are available, but the ones I have tried do not make significant difference.

Make sure both your decoding and encoding are on hardware, then. You might be cycling frames through system RAM.
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