FFmpeg is 20 years old today • Hacker News Board

Re: FFmpeg is 20 years old today

#31

Post by MrRadar » Sun, Dec 20, 2020, 7:38 PM UTC

dylan604 wrote: post #28

cpach wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wouldn't say we "suffered with VHS" since VHS actually has higher resolution (it records the full 480/576 vertical lines of broadcast TV, with horizontal resolution similar to VCD), VHS tapes could hold 2-8 hours (vs 74-80 minutes for VCD, not even enough for a standard "feature length" film), and you could record your own VHS tapes (which was the original selling point of home VCRs, not pre-recorded tapes; by the time CD recorders became cheap DVD was already released).

Re: FFmpeg is 20 years old today

#32

Post by tomaszs » Sun, Dec 20, 2020, 7:41 PM UTC

Years years ago I have used FFmpeg to create a video tutorial website. It worked like a charm on my CentOS VPS. I was able to scale videos uploaded by users to different resolutions, cut out frames for video cover, get size, resolution, convert video to different formats supported by various browsers. It was amazing and only solution available. The project was eventually suspended because of various reasons, but working with FFmpeg was amazing experience and still, when working with videos it is a great solution. Surely FFmpeg impact on today's internet is far bigger than anyone of us can assume. It is for video internet, what mp3 was for audio internet.

Re: FFmpeg is 20 years old today

#33

Post by heavyset_go » Sun, Dec 20, 2020, 7:41 PM UTC

ffmpeg is great. I've run into more than a few consumer devices that use it for transcoding, which I thought was pretty cool.

Re: FFmpeg is 20 years old today

#34

Post by js2 » Sun, Dec 20, 2020, 7:45 PM UTC

Literally just used it today to re-sync the audio and video in some movies I recorded where I needed to add a 210ms delay to the audio. There's no better tool that I know of for doing this, even on macOS:

    ffmpeg \
        -i "$input" -itsoffset "$offset" \
        -i "$input" \
        -map 0:0 \
        -map 1:1 \
        -acodec copy \
        -vcodec copy \
        "$output"

Re: FFmpeg is 20 years old today

#35

Post by heavyset_go » Sun, Dec 20, 2020, 7:45 PM UTC

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 wrappers over it, the Python one[1] is pretty good and it lets you build complex pipelines represented with graphs.

[1] https://github.com/kkroening/ffmpeg-python

Re: FFmpeg is 20 years old today

#36

Post by franga2000 » Sun, Dec 20, 2020, 8:02 PM UTC

petters wrote: post #23

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.

At their scale, they're almost certainly running entire racks' worth of servers entirely dedicated to just transcoding video and only able to access input and output files.

(quite likely, those are all actually virtual through some auto-scaling IaaS magic)

Re: FFmpeg is 20 years old today

#37

Post by dylan604 » Sun, Dec 20, 2020, 8:03 PM UTC

MrRadar wrote: post #31

dylan604 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wouldn't say we "suffered with VHS" since VHS actually has higher resolution (it records the full 480/576 vertical lines of broadcast TV, with horizontal resolution similar to VCD), VHS tapes could hold 2-8 hours (vs 74-80 minutes for VCD, not even enough for a standard "feature length" film), and you could record your own VHS tapes (which was the original selling point of home VCRs, not pre-recorded tapes; by the…

I'm well aware of these "benefits" you speak of, but it was still a crap format for video. If you were satisfied with VHS, then I'm happy for you. However, VHS was the absolute worst video format. It was the penultimate example of how end users did not compare about quality. Early YouTube also demonstrated this. Laser Discs required flipping over. VCDs required a second disc. First gen DVDs were DVD-10s which required flipping over (until they eventually got DVD-9s working).

Even with VCD being half the resolution of the SD image, it was still a much better image than VHS could ever do.

Re: FFmpeg is 20 years old today

#38

Post by irrational » Sun, Dec 20, 2020, 8:06 PM UTC

So the Web is 30 years old today and FFmpeg is 20 years old today? Did the creator of FFmpeg purposefully start it on the 10 year anniversary of the WWW?

Re: FFmpeg is 20 years old today

#39

Post by jofaz » Sun, Dec 20, 2020, 8:20 PM UTC

MrRadar wrote: post #31

dylan604 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wouldn't say we "suffered with VHS" since VHS actually has higher resolution (it records the full 480/576 vertical lines of broadcast TV, with horizontal resolution similar to VCD), VHS tapes could hold 2-8 hours (vs 74-80 minutes for VCD, not even enough for a standard "feature length" film), and you could record your own VHS tapes (which was the original selling point of home VCRs, not pre-recorded tapes; by the…

I thought VHS only had around 240 lines unless you used SuperVHS

Re: FFmpeg is 20 years old today

#40

Post by bigbubba » Sun, Dec 20, 2020, 8:24 PM UTC

asveikau wrote: post #11

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.

I feel like the basics are simple and intuitive. Enough use of it and you will not consult docs for the most basic tasks. Then you start to think "but how do I...?" and go to google. I tend to also forget the answer after a few months.

> I tend to also forget the answer after a few months

You can add comments to the end of tricky commands with the # character. Then at a later date you can search for commands using the contents of those comments, using something like C-r.