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It's difficult to understand what this is about without the presentation from Anton, at VideoLAN Dev Days 2023, that you can watch here: https://www.youtube.com
by jbk 3y ago
It's difficult to understand what this is about without the presentation from Anton, at VideoLAN Dev Days 2023, that you can watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4DS3jiZhfo&t=1221 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4DS3jiZhfo&t=1221
- bobsmooth 3y agoWhat is difficult to understand? Does multithreaded mean something different in the realm of video transcoding?
- bootloop 3y ago> "multi-threading it's not really all about just multi-threading - I will say more about that later - but that is the marketable term" That's whats said in the video at least in the first 10 seconds so it might be that multi-threading is just a too trivial term for the work here. (But haven't watched the video yet so just an observation.)
- rolandog 3y agoIf I recall correctly, he meant that multi-threading wasn't a direct goal, but a "side effect" of rewriting some parts of the codebase to match the expected conceptual flow, and paying off some re-write debt that had been accumulated after years of new features being "tacked on".
- defrost 3y agoThere are many different types of pipelined processing tasks with many differing kinds of threading approaches, and I guess the video clears up what kinds of approaches work best with transcoding ..
- t43562 3y agoHis work is not primarily about multithreading but about cleaning up ffmpeg to be true to its own architecture so that normal human beings have a chance of being able to maintain it. Things like making data flow one way in a pipeline, separating public and private state and having clearly defined interfaces. Things had got so bad that every change was super difficult to make. Multithreading comes out as a natural benefit of the cleanup.
- pjc50 3y ago^ This: I just spent the ~20 minutes necessary to watch that part of the talk at a reasonable 1.5x speed, and that's the summary. Ffmpeg was suffering from 20 years of incremental change and lack of cleanup/refactoring, and that's what he's spent two years doing. A couple of great lines including "my test for deprecating an option is if it's been broken for years and nobody is complaining, then definitely nobody is using it".
- andrewstuart 3y agoI often look for obscure options to get specialists tasks done in all sorts of software. Better to fix the option. Just because I didn’t go to the very significant effort of complaining doesn’t mean I didn’t want and burn hours trying to use that option.
- pjc50 3y agoThe verdict of the presentation was that many options are (bad) duplicates of the filter graph, and you should configure the software through the filter graph. We saw in openssl what the consequences of never removing any code for decades were. It has a real cost. Always a case-by-case decision, though.
- Zagitta 3y agoYou can't expect open source developers to be omniscient and know you want to use a specific feature if you don't communicate that to them. Would you rather have them add telemetry?
- radlad 3y agoFixing the option takes time and expertise, as well as an idea of what users actually are trying to do. If you don't give feedback to developers, how do you expect them to know you wanted to use the option? Better to remove a broken feature than let users burn hours futilely trying to make it work.
- smcnally 3y agoAnd “the most-popular encoder on at least two planets” as Mars Rover Perseverance runs it. https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/lpz3l7/the_mars_2020_perseverance_rover_is_using_ffmpeg/ https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/lpz3l7/the_mars_2020...
- gbersac 3y agoI love this guy! He's a very talented guy who devoted his life to open source.
- lofaszvanitt 3y agoHope he doesn't have to beg for donations.
- gooseus 3y agoNice, great presentation! Curious what he has in mind for the "dynamic pipelines" and "scripting (Lua?)" he mentions in the "Future directions" section. I'm imagining something more powerful for animating properties?
- dylan604 3y agoMan, i really want to watch this presentation, but the piss poor audio just causes my brain to have a fit. How in today's time is this still possible to screw up so badly?
- jugad 3y agoWhat are you talking about... the audio might not professional studio level 10/10, but I don't see anything significantly wrong with it - given that its more like a standard presentation mic. Its clearly good enough.
- dylan604 3y agoEvery time he turns away from the mic and continues talking while looking at the projection his volume goes way down and at best sounds like a mumble. It is very taxing to keep up with him when he's turned away. It's the wrong mic for the task.
- wildekek 3y agoAgreed. Maybe some are not as sensitive to this, but it is a major energy suck for me. A little post-processing on noise and compression would come a long way. This recording is as raw as the Ramsey meme.
- jbk 3y agoWe're very happy for your volunteering to record our next developer conference, tickets are free!
- dylan604 3y agoif you weren't on a different continent separated by a very large body of water, I'd be there. I'll donate by suggesting the use of a lav mic vs a podium mic. It is very difficult for some people to be able to understand clearly voices that are muddled from off axis audio recording. It's a real condition. I have hard time hearing voices in a crowded room from people across the table from me. We spend time worrying about the aria tags in our mark up, but we just assume that everyone has the same hearing abilities? I get that most people probably don't think about this when they don't have a hearing condition, but to be dismissive about it is an entirely different level of egregiousness. Could my initial criticism have been provided with an entirely different tact, absolutely. But after the mental exhaustion that video was, that was all the energy I could afford at the time.
- aidenn0 3y agoOh, I've run into so many issues related to the "Extras" listed on the slide at ~33m into that video.