All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020) • Hacker News Board

Re: All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

#111

Post by jeffreygoesto » Sat, Dec 25, 2021, 9:42 AM UTC

ganzuul wrote: post #103

marcodiego wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do we need a "Think before code" manifesto?

This is a true counter-standpoint to all the agile cargo cult that has been developed in the last years... Not to be taken as 100% dogma, like everything...

Re: All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

#112

Post by sonar_un » Sat, Dec 25, 2021, 9:52 AM UTC

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.

Are you sure you are using the h264_videotoolbox options? I mean, you might be, but that, for me, seems to be the problem. Ffmpeg is quite fast if you can invoke the hardware encoders.

Re: All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

#113

Post by kiwijamo » Sat, Dec 25, 2021, 9:55 AM UTC

laumars wrote: post #97

rurban wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

It was indeed Arch. Not sure about the comment about Debian as IIRC it's more or less the same in Debian. Using gstreamer seems to be more of a GNOME thing than anything to do with distros.

Re: All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

#114

Post by ollifi » Sat, Dec 25, 2021, 10:05 AM UTC

sonar_un wrote: post #112

ollifi wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you sure you are using the h264_videotoolbox options? I mean, you might be, but that, for me, seems to be the problem. Ffmpeg is quite fast if you can invoke the hardware encoders.

Yes I am using videotoolbox. I need to clarify that ffmpeg is not slow (it runs close to realtime bit under 20 fps) problem is that other tools reach 72 frames per second.

Re: All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

#115

Post by xwdv » Sat, Dec 25, 2021, 10:38 AM UTC

vanviegen wrote: post #108

Uehreka wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Imagine someday we can take photos from slices of a brain and use it replay a person’s memories, and the program used for that would of course be ffmpeg.

Re: All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

#116

Post by ChrisMarshallNY » Sat, Dec 25, 2021, 10:39 AM UTC

The big deal about using FFMPEG, is tuning it (tweaking the arguments).

I never got particularly good at that.

There are people that have made entire careers of tuning FFMPEG.

I liked his making a $1K donation.

Re: All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

#117

Post by qayxc » Sat, Dec 25, 2021, 10:48 AM UTC

marcan_42 wrote: post #98

ellis0n wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

> It's just not humanly possible to get this right in every instance.

That's what theorem provers and model driven development are for.

I wish these tools could be used more. There should also be automated completeness checkers for requirements and specs - a lot of errors, incompatibilities and security issues are the result of ambiguous, contradictory, or incomplete specs and requirements.

Re: All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

#118

Post by dmr_92 » Sat, Dec 25, 2021, 10:53 AM UTC

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…

Don't know if you'd consider them giant, but a former colleague tells me that Pexip uses Gstreamer for video-wrangling. (Hearsay, admittedly)

Re: All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

#119

Post by barbs » Sat, Dec 25, 2021, 10:56 AM UTC

I've only used ffmpeg for some minor video edits, it seems super powerful and is obviously quite ubiquitous. I'm curious to know what people have used it for? I'm sure there are some interesting use-cases out there.

Re: All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

#120

Post by wongarsu » Sat, Dec 25, 2021, 10:59 AM UTC

egman_ekki wrote: post #84

bigiain wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, perhaps more likely, sowing the seeds for humanities demise by enabling the existence of YouTube/TikTok et al.

Demise? Maybe that's how you neutralize the next Hitlers. You let them watch TikTok and become obsessed with dancing.

When you get rejected from art Academy today you can just start a YouTube or TikTok with drawing tutorials, or timelapses of yourself painting. So many possibilities, when in the last century you might have just given up on your passion and gone into politics