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All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

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Re: All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

#151
post #124

I think it is worth posting Tom Vaughan [1]( Father of x265 )'s reply here. >FFMPEG is a media processing framework. It's great for simple media processing jobs (builds a graph, runs the graph). A build of "FFMPEG" includes that media processing framework plus dozens of open source libraries (filters) that do the actual work (x265, x265, libav, etc). >So "FFMPEG" gets a lot of well deserved credit (it's the framework…

libav is a part of FFmpeg, and the heart of it. But FFmpeg isn't just a skeleton. Most decoders + protocols + demuxers / muxsers + filters + scaler + resampler are native components.

The most well-known 3rd party libs provide a few (albeit commonly used) video encoders. Of course, having interfaces for these external libs is what allows media operations to be consolidated into a single process workflow. As standalone tools, x264/x265 would be more cumbersome to integrate into a pipeline.

Re: All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

#152
post #124

I think it is worth posting Tom Vaughan [1]( Father of x265 )'s reply here. >FFMPEG is a media processing framework. It's great for simple media processing jobs (builds a graph, runs the graph). A build of "FFMPEG" includes that media processing framework plus dozens of open source libraries (filters) that do the actual work (x265, x265, libav, etc). >So "FFMPEG" gets a lot of well deserved credit (it's the framework…

> It is also worth stating this is from 2020. I am not sure why this is submitted now.

I came across it a day or two ago in a reply to @Suhail's thread of donating to OSS projects[0]. I suspect that's where the submitter saw it as well.

[0] https://twitter.com/nurblieh/status/1473695776253648911

Re: All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

#153
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This can be done, and indeed was done for an ancient photograph of an ancient record that no longer existed. In that case I think they used some photoshop magic to ‘unspiral’ the groove and something else to decode the image. The result wasn’t super high quality.

Vinyl starts as a poor material for recording music and only gets worse with age and use. Take a picture if it on old film and develop it with old techniques, and you end up with the worst possible recording medium. I'm impressed they got anything from it.

There's a recording medium which is worse than a photograph of vinyl.

None.

If an old photo is what you've got, make the best at extracting from it.

Re: All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

#154
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vinyl starts as a poor material for recording music and only gets worse with age and use. Take a picture if it on old film and develop it with old techniques, and you end up with the worst possible recording medium. I'm impressed they got anything from it.

There's a recording medium which is worse than a photograph of vinyl. None. If an old photo is what you've got, make the best at extracting from it.

This seems like an argument against something I didn't say in the comment you replied to. Maybe I misunderstood you.

Re: All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

#155
post #58

The "triumph of high quality open source software" is wrong because ffmpeg is old C/ASM hacky code (not even C++, optimized by speed for hardware). I got my first experience of optimizing ffmpeg video decoder for AMD Alchemy processor in 2006. Let's take a look at the history of ffmpeg created by hackers for hackers. Do you remember how many times you saw strange squares on the screen when rewinding a YouTube video o…

What's high quality open source software? ffmpeg works well, I don't think an alternative would be much better. There will never be a software without bugs. The alternative would be spending tons of money for another piece of software with more bugs.

Re: All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

#156
post #63
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.

The only thing I can think of is the quote:

“The paraphrase of Gödel's Theorem says that for any record player, there are records which it cannot play because they will cause its indirect self-destruction.”

―Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach

Re: All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

I understand what you're referring to, but such a manifesto, if even moderately successful, would inevitably become dogma, and then lead us right back to... waterfall.

Re: All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

#158
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…

While ffmpeg does support a lot of really old / obscure media formats, support isn’t nearly as good for professional broadcast / film video formats. DNxHD can be hit or miss and it doesn’t support formats like OMF or AAF. I have heard some broadcasters’ QC departments reject ProRes created by ffmpeg as invalid.

Re: All the giant companies used ffmpeg (2020)

#160
post #47
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?

How can it be funded? I would love to work more on open source.

I saw Fabrice comment here during the log4j debacle complaining about how hard it is to get funding. I'd say the answer is that it mostly doesn't, and that there is a very small paid team working on it.
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