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Saying goodbye to FFmpegKit
- ericdiao 2y agoFFMpegKit at https://github.com/arthenica/ffmpeg-kit https://github.com/arthenica/ffmpeg-kit is discontinued by the author
- rwmj 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y agoHad to check GitHub "FFmpegKit is a collection of tools to use FFmpeg in Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, tvOS, Flutter and React Native applications."
- scosman 2y agoThey are writing the article for a specific audience: ffmpegkit users. All tech articles assume some prior technical knowledge.
- rwmj 2y agoAnd yet it was posted here and many people who know nothing of the project will read it. Writing a sentence saying what the thing is takes a few words.
- Igrom 2y agoAnd clicking on a link to GitHub takes no time at all. Is there anything wrong with that approach? Furthermore, I feel that you shouldn't blame the author for omissions if their post is shared outside of the intended audience.
- rwmj 2y agoWe could make every reader do the extra work, or the author could write a few words once.
- JamesSwift 2y agoIt seems you are suggesting they would do it every time they post though
- dragonwriter 2y agoWell, yeah, you can go bug the authors of stories like this that someone (not the author!) at HN decides to post a link to that they need to change how they write for the benefit of an audience they aren't actively seeking, but I doubt that will do much good. But its especially silly to post on HN that authors need to change how they are writing in a thread on an article that wasn't posted here by the author, and where there is no indication that the author is a member of the community.
- mjmsmith 2y agoHe could title that section Why #3.
- retrocryptid 2y agoI suspect there was a human who posted a link to the OP's post here on HN. It is -that- human who was being asked to provide context since they should have know that by posting a link to HN, they are posting a link to a community that may be different from the OP's original audience. i.e.- this was not a rerquest or taner saner to provide context, but a request for @ericdiao to provide context.
- xg15 2y agoExcept HN explicitly discourages this: You can intentionally submit either a text post or a link, but not both. For links, you could theoretically edit the title, but there too, the guidelines state that you should just use the original title from the article if possible.
- xg15 2y agoI see that more of a downside of HN's policy of essentially demanding that articles are posted without any context or explanation. It's not the job of the author to provide context for an audience they didn't even write for - but it would be HN's job to provide context for its own audience.
- dragonwriter 2y ago> And yet it was posted here Not by the author, so I don't see how that impacts how it should be written; and HN users are free to ignore things that don't interest them, or to spend a few minutes with a search engine learning context for things that seem like they might, but which are unfamiliar (and are generally competent to both of those things as appropriate.)
- swatcoder 2y agoAlternately, if you're reading an article about something and realize it assumes familiarity that you don't have, stop reading it or follow your curiosity. The person who wrote the article did so for the audience of people that follow them, who would already be familiar with FFmpegkit: there would be no point to describing it because the name would be de facto known. Because the web is open, they don't have control over whose eyes stumble upon it and didn't submit it here. But the link got modest traction here nonetheless because enough people are already familiar or at least curious. It's a very organic process and neither the writer, the submitter, nor yourself are under any particular obligations.
- rwmj 2y agoI'm not sure if I'm interested in ffmpegkit or not (because it wasn't described), but I am interested in the dynamics of open source communities, so stopping reading the article would miss the point for me. Plus I guess as a writer you want people to read your stuff. Obviously if you don't, then don't follow all the usual rules of good journalism like the inverted pyramid, which is what I'm describing here.
- swatcoder 2y agoThis wasn't journalism; it was an address written for a personally invested audience. And even most journalism, as most writing, is written with mind with to some specific vision of its audience. That you happened to come across it is just a coincidence. What you choose to do with it is up to you, and as someone who wasn't already aware of FFmpegKit and therefore not among the addressees, presumably of no particular bearing to the author.
- conductr 2y agoYou have a link to your blog in your profile, I don’t understand anything the top post is talking about and you’ve given little/no context. I can guess it’s hardware benchmarking related and I know I’m not particularly interested in that and I can opt to bounce away. And I did. I’m not asking you to go write a better intro to ease me into something I’m not interested in. I had never used ffmpeg kit but it linked to their GitHub in the first sentence and I could quick grasp what it was from a ton of context clues. I had played with ffmpeg about 20 years ago. So kinda had some idea it was related to video, if I didn’t know that already, the “mpeg” part is a giveaway. But really I’m not interested in codecs or whatever, I am interested in the business/legal parts of software and that’s what they wrote about and got into it quickly which i appreciated. Anyways, you seem to have an unpopular opinion that you don’t even practice yourself is my main criticism here.
- rwmj 2y agoTouché, I will improve it now. Edit: Updated version - https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2024/11/19/benchmarking-risc-v-spacemit-x60-and-others/ https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2024/11/19/benchmarking-risc-v-sp...
- bsimpson 2y agoPaying contractors to support your free GitHub project is wild. Open source is beautiful and broken at the same time.
- freeone3000 2y agoI don’t see this being broken in the slightest! What’s the issue with paying someone to write code you don’t want to?
- bsimpson 2y agoFeeling obligated to appease unseen internet freeloaders. If you do it because you want it for your stuff, cool. If you do it because you feel obliged to appease "the community" who takes for granted that you support them, that's a symptom of the broken model that is open source. Has echos of the Linux for Apple Silicon guy last week who used to be a Wii modder, tired of the support tickets from entitled pirates, moved to a niche Linux distro, and discovered a similar sense of entitlement in the issue tracker.
- kelnos 2y agoIn general, nothing, but it made me a bit sad that the maintainer believed he "owed" the community (likely 99% full of people who were using his work for free) to the point that he spent money for someone else to do work that he couldn't find time to do himself. Instead of just shuttering the project earlier, and saving that money. I really hope the "significant sum" he paid was out of donations to the project, and not his own money. Even then, it sounds like he's poured a ton of his time and energy into the project over the years, so even if it was all donated money, he certainly could have kept it for himself without any moral/ethical concerns.
- pjc50 2y agoAh, it's MPEG-LA again, the reason why we can't have nice things.
- stackedinserter 2y agoFTFY the laws that allow MPEG-LA to exist are the reason why we can't have nice things.
- DrillShopper 2y agoIt can be both - just because it's legal for MPEG-LA to act that way it doesn't require them to do so
- kelnos 2y agoNo, but human nature is such that all it takes is a handful of unscrupulous people who see laws that they can use to their financial advantage. We can certainly assign blame to the people who work for MPEG-LA/Via-LA, but ultimately there will always be organizations like that as long as the law allows or incentivizes that sort of thing. If we care about outcomes, the only thing to do is get the law changed so companies like that can't exist. Not because they are banned, but because there's no business model there.
- lmm 2y agoThe ability to create limited-liability corporations at will encourages certain kinds of unethical behaviour, where you grab unethical nickels until you're hit by the steamroller of the law but still come out ahead. We should indeed be looking to get the law changed so companies like that can't exist; part of that should be reserving limited liability for entities that create a corresponding public interest benefit rather than handing it out like candy.
- bobbob1921 2y agoIts unfortunate that more corporations don’t contribute to the same open source that they make use of for profit. (I know some do however).
- amiga386 2y ago> However, in 2023, MPEG LA was acquired by Via-LA, and everything changed. When I reached out to Via-LA in late 2024 to confirm FFmpegKit’s position under their terms, I received no response. The real reason. Greedy bastards, and the risk of your business being set on fire by greedy bastards, even if they don't have a right to anything - they can still threaten to waste your time and money and offer a shakedown instead. I've never used FFmpegKit (I've mostly just used the command-line, or indirectly via yt-dlp and Handbrake) but just hearing about it now, the maintainer sounds like an awesome person who really went above and beyond to support free software, so hooray for them! I bet it was useful for thousands of other projects, and those people are all grateful too.
- cm2187 2y agoFrom the article, Via-LA just didn't respond to the author, that doesn't really say anything about their position. It's a bit premature to call them greedy bastard. The author is doing this out of an abundance of caution, not in response of a legal action.
- bayindirh 2y agoConsidering that MPEG-LA and in turn Via-LA only provides non-commercial licenses with the hardware which can encode/decode the codecs under their umbrella, and (Via-LA) stays silent on a matter so they can snipe people from the distance, they are the de-facto greedy ones. ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42736254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42736254
- amiga386 2y agoIf I write to the Mafia asking to confirm they won't burn my store to the ground, they won't write back saying "no". They're not obligated to respond, and they enjoy the fear, uncertainty and doubt their non-response creates.
- iambateman 2y agoIf I ask my city if they will enforce their explicitly written zoning policy against renting a single room to a tenant, they won’t write back. But they also have no intention of enforcing that policy. It doesn’t make them evil…just bureaucratic.
- Gormo 2y agoIt seems really strange that a library that wraps FFMpeg is being discontinued due to patent concerns with the underlying codecs, but those codecs are only implemented in FFMpeg itself, which continues along without issues.
- amiga386 2y agoffmpeg, VLC and its associated projects are hosted in France. There aren't any US companies for the MAFIAA to shakedown, and if they tried to file for software patent infringement in France, the French courts would tell them to fuck off. So they go after ffmpeg's US-based users/customers instead.
- HeatrayEnjoyer 2y agoDo French courts enforce patents differently?
- amiga386 2y agoFrance was one of the first countries in Europe to ban software patents, in 1968. France is also a party to the European Patent Convention, which specifically states that programs for computers are not patentable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_the_European_Patent_Convention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_the_Eur... Software patents are mainly a US-only thing.
- doawoo 2y agoHaving dealt with MPEG-LA before, it makes me so wildly angry that a company composed of nothing but lawyers can suck money out of any product that wants to use a widely supported, arguably critical video codec. The process for reporting to them for sales is also horrible. Uploading excel spreadsheets to an ASP.NET backend that's barely holding together. It's minimal effort from them to leverage all possible legal action over you. Horrible.
- chefandy 2y agoAs an artist, this sort of shit makes me apoplectic. I’m frustrated that society has no way to compensate people that do creative work for a living other than the same mechanism that virii like this extract money from other people’s work using a paper turnstile and heavy penalties for violations. And between the two kinds of entities, only one realistically even has the significant resources needed to engage the mechanism. I understand that a lot of folks in tech consider both of these usages to be largely equivalent but that’s a different conversation.
- echelon 2y ago> I’m frustrated that society has no way to compensate people that do creative work for a living other than the same mechanism that virii like this extract money from other people’s work using a paper turnstile and heavy penalties for violations. Steam, YouTube, Instagram, Patreon, BandCamp, commissions... The creator economy is booming and is on the rise. I've seen some metrics say it's got a 40% CAGR. MrBeast, PsychicPebbles, VivziePop, Joel Haver - all made brands for themselves. The currency is personal brand. Most of the creators I follow these days are indies, not big studios. But even excepting that, you can always work for a big studio if you're not interested in the additional headache of working for yourself and building a personal brand. Gaming, film, and music are huge and there are companies hiring in these spaces.
- doawoo 2y ago> all made brands for themselves Ah there's the magic word! You shouldn't have to be a "brand"... the people you listed are not who I would call "independent". Capitalism is the root of evil to all this. Sorry.
- weinzierl 2y ago"To get clarity, I consulted an IP law firm. Their review raised concerns about potential risks related to licensing and patents. They recommended retiring the project and removing older binaries as the safest option. They did suggest some alternative paths, but those options would have required significant time, effort, and money, neither of which I could commit." Thanks to Taner Sener for putting in all the effort! I guess most technical people shudder at the mere thought of dealing with all the legal matters.
- jamesfmilne 2y agoI was under the impression you can't ship FFMPEG in an app on iOS/tvOS/iPadOS anyway given FFMPEG is licensed as LGPL.
- lstamour 2y agoWhile there might be incompatibilities with GPL and the App Store due to Apple’s insistence that developers must accept Apple’s terms to run Xcode and apps on developer devices, LGPL and other open source licenses are generally compatible with the App Store and Apple’s licenses. You can ship programs that use open source or are themselves open source within closed ecosystems by providing source code to end users via a website linked to within credits within the app. This distinction is because LGPL in particular permits more usage than GPL, allowing you to use the library in non-open source apps or those licensed under different terms, so ffmpeg has been somewhat adopted by a variety of open and closed source apps when a shared codebase is desired or particular codecs or functionality is required. That said, Apple themselves would prefer that you use their audio/video frameworks, due to device performance optimization, binary sizes, licensing and ecosystem lock-in. As far as I know, ffmpeg has adopted some of these Apple optimizations when appropriate frameworks are detected and configured at compile time.
- actionfromafar 2y agoHow do I relink a random app on the app store with my own version an LGPL library? This is what it comes down to.
- smashah 2y agoIsn't it bundled with chrome?
- pipeline_peak 2y ago“Guy gets tired of doing whole ass job in his spare time” Jk, thank you for your work!
- j1elo 2y agoWhy #1: not enough time and money. The project had become a time sink, I get it. But that's exactly why OSS is a "What You See Is What You Get". Normally I'd encourage any OSS maintainer in this position to just announce their intentions and let the community (as small as it might be) decide to either inherit maintenance and development of the project, or let it languish. I don't see any reason to close the repos so dramatically, depriving potential future readers of reaching the source code and improving upon it, as is the spirit of OSS. The project had also become an actual cost, getting to the point of hiring contractors to make releases and please users (who would most probably have been unwilling to pay for that themselves, as my experience tells me most FOSS users are just freeloaders with no intention at all of supporting the project in any way or means). Well, what can I say, this conversation appears from time to time in HN. OSS maintainers need to have that special kind of ability to say "No" or even "I don't care" because otherwise the project (and its users) tend to absorb the author's attention, goodwill, wallet, and enthusiasm. It's very healthy, as a maintainer, to be able to ruthlessly point to the License file whenever someone complains and even _requires_ attention. The "Provided on an AS-IS BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND" phrase is wonderful. I understand the author. The feeling of attachment and goodwill, the desire to show the highest attention to detail and quality support for a project is always there. We all experience it. But it's important to remember at all times that OSS is just an act of generosity to the universe, it cannot become a self-induced hell. Why #2: legal concerns around potential litigations. Yeah, I know it myself too: distributing FFmpeg binaries can be a legal risk if some codecs were enabled in the build. Still no reason to shut everything down... or is it? My gut instinct for this is to "just" (I know, not a trivial change, but not astronomically complicated either) change to a "provide your own FFmpeg executable, please" model. Then, proceed with abandoning the project, as per the previous point. Or just move everything to an anonymous Chinese Git provider.. and forget about receiving legal threats in there (just half-joking!)
- Artoooooor 2y agoAh, patent rights, when even legality of something can be debatable. How the heck is anyone supposed to follow the law if for every action A they have to ask lawyer if A is legal?
- r2vcap 2y agoI’ve never used FFmpeg-kit—I always use FFmpeg from distro packages (Linux, Homebrew) or build it selectively—so I’m not sure how important it is. Is it just a thin wrapper around the FFmpeg C API for various platforms? If that’s the case, software engineers relying on it should learn how to build FFmpeg from source and handle platform-specific challenges (especially on Android). The loss of the overall community support doesn’t seem that significant, right? That said, whether someone uses FFmpeg-kit or builds FFmpeg manually, the legal risks remain the same. If they don’t understand codec patents (like x264 and MPEG-LA) or GPL/LGPL obligations, they could face lawsuits or be forced to release their code under GPL. The real issue isn’t FFmpeg-kit—it’s whether developers actually understand these legal implications.
- kingdomcome50 2y agoI had never heard of ffmpeg until yesterday. In fact, I just Googled the term because I _still_ wasn't sure what it was beyond a dependency required to utilize a huggingface model I was testing. And now here we are... Farewell FFmpegKit. You will be missed.
- sangnoir 2y agoEvery media processing or delivery service you've interacted with in the last decade is a lib-ffmpeg wrapper, including broadcast TV, streaming, or anything remotely related to re-encoding video. I'm only being slightly hyperbolic, FFMpeg is ubiquitous.
- shmerl 2y agoI think contacting patent trolls about anything like their opinion on legal matters about existing projects is a huge mistake. It only gives them the idea whom to shake down (namely you, since you contacted them)! It also probably makes it easier for them to claim that you knew about their patents when they come to shake you down. Don't feed the trolls!