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FFmpeg has to be the best example of OSS done wrong. While it is incredibly powerful in what it can do and is overall a great project, it is crazy difficult to

by bkaid 16y ago

FFmpeg has to be the best example of OSS done wrong. While it is incredibly powerful in what it can do and is overall a great project, it is crazy difficult to get it to build right, documentation of anything is scattered across newsgroups, the developers are always having arguments like this lately, and the API has breaking changes all the time, including completely removing functionality without any sort of replacement.

Locke1689 16y ago
There is a fair bit a developer churn, the project doesn't have very strong leadership, and the source code is messier than it should be. Let's just say my experience was less than perfect. Add to that language barriers and it is just a very hard project to work for. Of course, projects like VLC and mplayer still get a lot of the credit for the hard work that FFmpeg is mostly responsible for.
- bkaid 16y ago
  And the countless crappy paid windows video converter apps that don't credit FFMpeg and all they do is do shell out to ffmpeg. I get a chuckle out of the the FFMpeg wall of shame (which is honestly smaller than it should be): http://www.ffmpeg.org/shame.html http://www.ffmpeg.org/shame.html
  - jawngee 16y ago
    Almost all of the apps in the video category on the Mac app store are the same.
  - Locke1689 16y ago
    I'm almost more OK with that than the VLC people. It's not that I have anything against VLC, but they recently did an AMA on Reddit and it kind of rubbed me the wrong way. The primary thing the VLC team gets credit for is being able to play pretty much anything you throw at it, but that's the product of a lot of DSP work that me and mostly a ton of other people a lot more talented than me did. If VLC came out and said "we make graphics frontends and command line options" that would be one thing, but there was a trend to accept the praise without coming out and saying that they weren't responsible for most of the work. It was especially frustrating for me because I actually dislike a lot of the UI/UX decisions that VLC made, which was their primary contribution to the media player. I understand it when unscrupulous people rip off FFmpeg, but I had hoped there would be more honor among fellow OSS developers.
    - jbk 16y ago
      Please, stop spreading FUD. First, we didn't do an AMA on Reddit. Then, the UI/UX part of VLC is around 1/30th of the VLC codebase (not counting external libraries) and most of the code is demuxers, decoders, protocol handlers (all custom), video outputs, video filter, clock, audio filters and libraries wrapper (not only libavcodec). Did you actually look at the codebase before saying things like this? Then, VLC developers have worked on libavcodec, like for DxVA2 acceleration, and have been telling people to add codecs inside libavcodec, and not directly VLC. > there was a trend to accept the praise without coming out Where did you see that "trend" ? Finally, I don't see what your work is on FFmpeg or other such libraries.
      - Locke1689 16y ago
        Edit: You know what, just disregard my first comment. It's mostly me being bitter and isn't productive at all. The solution is to have the projects work better together, not whine about who deserves the most credit. I apologize, you're right. I actually went back to look at it and it was all non-VLC people misrepresenting FFmpeg and VLC. Then, the UI/UX part of VLC is around 1/30th of the VLC codebase (not counting external libraries) and most of the code is demuxers, decoders, protocol handlers (all custom), video outputs, video filter, clock, audio filters and libraries wrapper (not only libavcodec). I didn't mean to say that VLC doesn't do anything important, I just felt that FFmpeg gets less credit than it deserves because it is less user-facing. As to the codebase and FFMpeg contributions: I actually have a patch sitting around that makes substantial bug fixes and improvements to the OS X VLC. Part of this was a result of my work in FFMpeg improving crash and corruption resilience. I wouldn't have worked on this if I didn't feel that VLC is a good project, so I apologize if you thought my comment misrepresented the project or the developers. It was simply meant to express a general frustration at the lack of recognition of FFMpeg developers.
        jbk 16y ago
        Apologies accepted :D We've tried to give more FFmpeg visibility, by adding badges to ffmpeg.org from our website (but this is on hold, because of the fork and the logo dispute), and we've reworked our about:box to show it more... But, the truth is that the actual reason we want to find a business model for VLC is that we want to pay FFmpeg developers to work on FFmpeg. If you have patches for VLC on OSX, please share, we need help on the OSX version of VLC.
- jbk 16y ago
  You are unfair to VLC and MPlayer. Developers from VLC and MPlayer are contributing to FFmpeg quite a bit, and especially more than people from Chrome, for example...
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
getsat 16y ago
Try compiling it on Windows using cygwin with x264 enabled... I literally spent an entire workday on it. It was not fun.
- bkaid 16y ago
  Yeah I went down this route and lost a lot of time also. I ended up cross compiling it for windows on ubuntu and it has worked out well enough but even that took nearly 2 days to track down how to do it and then add the filters and plugins I needed (for doing things I took for granted as being easy like video rotations, overlays, etc).
- statictype 16y ago
  That's a half the time it took me. I had to apply patches from news groups and take MingW headers from CVS (because the official release broke the build). On the other hand, once I compiled the libraries, I had no issues interfacing it with code in Visual C++ \C#. The source files are fairly clean and documented enough that I could mostly figure out what to do by looking at the code.

by bkaid 16y ago

Locke1689 16y ago

There is a fair bit a developer churn, the project doesn't have very strong leadership, and the source code is messier than it should be. Let's just say my experience was less than perfect. Add to that language barriers and it is just a very hard project to work for. Of course, projects like VLC and mplayer still get a lot of the credit for the hard work that FFmpeg is mostly responsible for.

bkaid 16y ago
And the countless crappy paid windows video converter apps that don't credit FFMpeg and all they do is do shell out to ffmpeg. I get a chuckle out of the the FFMpeg wall of shame (which is honestly smaller than it should be): http://www.ffmpeg.org/shame.html http://www.ffmpeg.org/shame.html
- jawngee 16y ago
  Almost all of the apps in the video category on the Mac app store are the same.
- Locke1689 16y ago
  I'm almost more OK with that than the VLC people. It's not that I have anything against VLC, but they recently did an AMA on Reddit and it kind of rubbed me the wrong way. The primary thing the VLC team gets credit for is being able to play pretty much anything you throw at it, but that's the product of a lot of DSP work that me and mostly a ton of other people a lot more talented than me did. If VLC came out and said "we make graphics frontends and command line options" that would be one thing, but there was a trend to accept the praise without coming out and saying that they weren't responsible for most of the work. It was especially frustrating for me because I actually dislike a lot of the UI/UX decisions that VLC made, which was their primary contribution to the media player. I understand it when unscrupulous people rip off FFmpeg, but I had hoped there would be more honor among fellow OSS developers.
  - jbk 16y ago
    Please, stop spreading FUD. First, we didn't do an AMA on Reddit. Then, the UI/UX part of VLC is around 1/30th of the VLC codebase (not counting external libraries) and most of the code is demuxers, decoders, protocol handlers (all custom), video outputs, video filter, clock, audio filters and libraries wrapper (not only libavcodec). Did you actually look at the codebase before saying things like this? Then, VLC developers have worked on libavcodec, like for DxVA2 acceleration, and have been telling people to add codecs inside libavcodec, and not directly VLC. > there was a trend to accept the praise without coming out Where did you see that "trend" ? Finally, I don't see what your work is on FFmpeg or other such libraries.
    - Locke1689 16y ago
      Edit: You know what, just disregard my first comment. It's mostly me being bitter and isn't productive at all. The solution is to have the projects work better together, not whine about who deserves the most credit. I apologize, you're right. I actually went back to look at it and it was all non-VLC people misrepresenting FFmpeg and VLC. Then, the UI/UX part of VLC is around 1/30th of the VLC codebase (not counting external libraries) and most of the code is demuxers, decoders, protocol handlers (all custom), video outputs, video filter, clock, audio filters and libraries wrapper (not only libavcodec). I didn't mean to say that VLC doesn't do anything important, I just felt that FFmpeg gets less credit than it deserves because it is less user-facing. As to the codebase and FFMpeg contributions: I actually have a patch sitting around that makes substantial bug fixes and improvements to the OS X VLC. Part of this was a result of my work in FFMpeg improving crash and corruption resilience. I wouldn't have worked on this if I didn't feel that VLC is a good project, so I apologize if you thought my comment misrepresented the project or the developers. It was simply meant to express a general frustration at the lack of recognition of FFMpeg developers.
      - jbk 16y ago
        Apologies accepted :D We've tried to give more FFmpeg visibility, by adding badges to ffmpeg.org from our website (but this is on hold, because of the fork and the logo dispute), and we've reworked our about:box to show it more... But, the truth is that the actual reason we want to find a business model for VLC is that we want to pay FFmpeg developers to work on FFmpeg. If you have patches for VLC on OSX, please share, we need help on the OSX version of VLC.
jbk 16y ago
You are unfair to VLC and MPlayer. Developers from VLC and MPlayer are contributing to FFmpeg quite a bit, and especially more than people from Chrome, for example...
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]

getsat 16y ago

Try compiling it on Windows using cygwin with x264 enabled... I literally spent an entire workday on it. It was not fun.

bkaid 16y ago
Yeah I went down this route and lost a lot of time also. I ended up cross compiling it for windows on ubuntu and it has worked out well enough but even that took nearly 2 days to track down how to do it and then add the filters and plugins I needed (for doing things I took for granted as being easy like video rotations, overlays, etc).
statictype 16y ago
That's a half the time it took me. I had to apply patches from news groups and take MingW headers from CVS (because the official release broke the build). On the other hand, once I compiled the libraries, I had no issues interfacing it with code in Visual C++ \C#. The source files are fairly clean and documented enough that I could mostly figure out what to do by looking at the code.