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FFmpeg is 20 years old today

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Re: FFmpeg is 20 years old today

#21

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

ffmpeg has become the de facto infrastructure for video processing.

It seems to have done a great job of keeping up to date, with things like GPUs and shader language and whatnot. I guess that's because he designed a good extension mechanism.

I'm grateful for it.

Re: FFmpeg is 20 years old today

#23

Post by petters »

anonacct37 wrote: post #22

So youtube used ffmpeg quite extensively. https://multimedia.cx/eggs/googles-youtube-uses-ffmpeg/ It wouldn't be too surprising if they still did.

It's pretty interesting that YouTube offers such a huge surface area for processing user-uploaded files. Some of those obscure formats should have a security flaw.

But the ffmpeg processes are surely sandboxed with seccomp or similar, so it probably does not matter at all.

Re: FFmpeg is 20 years old today

#24

Post by spicyramen »

Ffmpeg saved my life when I was troubleshooting some quality issues video calls and customer was about to cancel the contract, we reconstructed the video from packet captures and ffmpeg helped us track the issue to be a H245 media reset that was happening every now and then, ffmpeg was able to detect the fps variation. All free and well documented

Re: FFmpeg is 20 years old today

#25

Post by zinekeller »

cpach wrote: post #19
zinekeller wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

19 88 . [1] That even precedes MP3. 1: https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-H.261-198811-S/en

Wow. Had no idea it occurred so early.

Well, analogue HDTV and digital music formats were already experimented in '70s and '80s by Japanese [MUSE, Hi-Vision, CDs] and European [HD-MAC, NICAM, also CDs] researchers, so it is no surprise that similar research into digital realm are being performed [H.26*, MPEG-1 Audio Layer I to III and AAC (MPEG-2 Audio), and DVB and DAB were spearheaded by EBU and ETSI so no surprise there].

Re: FFmpeg is 20 years old today

#26

Post by the_cat_kittles »

ed25519FUUU wrote: post #2

Ffmpeg is an unusual piece of software. It’s CLI arguments (to me) are baffling. But it’s been around so long that there’s so many answered questions online for virtually anything you want it to do. Don’t bother reading the man page, go to google first.

its a very good example of what is truly useful conflicting with widely held notions of whats important to make good software. basically, despite the arcane invocations, i find it gets the job done more painlessly than any alternative most of the time.

Re: FFmpeg is 20 years old today

#27

Post by Griffinsauce »

m-p-3 wrote: post #17
asveikau wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A config file makes sense if every run takes the same config. But most ffmpeg options are specific to a task and inapplicable to many others.

Yeah I just make bunch of bash files (which also contains comment) for specific scenarios.

What's the difference with selecting different config files then?

Re: FFmpeg is 20 years old today

#28

Post by dylan604 »

cpach wrote: post #19
zinekeller wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

19 88 . [1] That even precedes MP3. 1: https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-H.261-198811-S/en

Wow. Had no idea it occurred so early.

VideoCDs (MPEG1 encoded) were around long before most in the US were even thinking about video on a computer. 352x240 CIF resolution in the early '90s. Much more popular in Asia. The US had to suffer with VHS until DVDs gained popularity in the early '00s.

Re: FFmpeg is 20 years old today

#29

Post by verylittlemeat »

riidom wrote: post #14
ed25519FUUU wrote: post #2

Ffmpeg is an unusual piece of software. It’s CLI arguments (to me) are baffling. But it’s been around so long that there’s so many answered questions online for virtually anything you want it to do. Don’t bother reading the man page, go to google first.

There are also tools with a GUI that make use of ffmpeg (calling them a GUI-wrapper is probably not fair). And ofc, they likely can't do everything ffmpeg CLI can. One I know is https://handbrake.fr Are there more?

I use Axiom to do basic ffmpeg stuff on a regular basis and it's never let me down.

https://axiomui.github.io/

Re: FFmpeg is 20 years old today

#30

Post by dylan604 »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #21

ffmpeg has become the de facto infrastructure for video processing. It seems to have done a great job of keeping up to date, with things like GPUs and shader language and whatnot. I guess that's because he designed a good extension mechanism. I'm grateful for it.

To do large quantities of transcoding, the industry was dominated in the world of using dedicated server and nodes to create a "farm". One system I managed was a $15k server, with each node being $5k each. Of course, you needed the hardware to run it as well. Now, install FFMPEG, create an image, and then spin up a new instance as needed.

A big Thank You to any and all who have brought FFMPEG to where it is!

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