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Seems so easy! You only need the entire world even tangentially related to video to rely solely on your project for a task and you too can have all the develope

Seems so easy! You only need the entire world even tangentially related to video to rely solely on your project for a task and you too can have all the developers you need to work on performance!

ackfoobar 1y ago
I seem to recall that they lamented on twitter the low amount of (monetary or code) contribution they got, despite how heavily they are used.
- lo_zamoyski 1y ago
  No one is forcing them to produce code for free. There is something toxic about giving things away for free with the ulterior motive of getting money for it.
  - imchillyb 1y ago
    It’s market manipulation, with the understanding that free beats every other metric. Once the competition fails, the value extraction process can begin. This is where the toxicity of our city begins to manifest. Once there is no competition remaining we can begin eating seeds as a pastime activity. The toxicity of our city; our city. How do you own the world? Disorder. Disorder…
- godelski 1y ago
  They have some fire tweets, especially when people say they write things from scratch or boast about how much money they make with ffmpeg wrappers https://x.com/FFmpeg/status/1775178803129602500 https://x.com/FFmpeg/status/1775178803129602500 https://x.com/FFmpeg/status/1856078171017281691 https://x.com/FFmpeg/status/1856078171017281691 https://x.com/FFmpeg/status/1950227075576823817 https://x.com/FFmpeg/status/1950227075576823817 Oh, and here's one making fun of HN comments. Hi ffmpeg :) https://x.com/FFmpeg/status/1947076489880486131 https://x.com/FFmpeg/status/1947076489880486131
- hdgvhicv 1y ago
  Wasn’t that a trillion dollar company demanding support for their little problem?
hluska 1y ago
You know friend, if open source actually worked like that I wouldn’t be so allergic to releasing projects. But it doesn’t - a large swath of the economy depends on unpaid labour being treated poorly by people who won’t or can’t contribute.
astrange 1y ago
ffmpeg has competition. For the longest time it wasn't the best audio encoder for any codec[0], and it wasn't the fastest H.264 decoder when everyone wanted that because a closed-source codec named CoreAVC was better[1]. ffmpeg was however, always the best open-source project, basically because it had all the smart developers who were capable of collaborating on anything. Its competition either wasn't smart enough and got lost in useless architecture-astronauting[2], or were too contrarian and refused to believe their encoder quality could get better because they designed it based on artificial PSNR benchmarks instead of actually watching the output. [0] For complicated reasons I don't fully understand myself, audio encoders don't get quality improvements by sharing code or developers the way decoders do. Basically because they use something called "psychoacoustic models" which are always designed for the specific codec instead of generalized. It might just be that noone's invented a way to do it yet. [1] I eventually fixed this by writing a new multithreading system, but it took me ~2 years of working off summer of code grants, because this was before there was much commercial interest in it. [2] This seems to happen whenever I see anyone try to write anything in C++. They just spend all day figuring out how to connect things to other things and never write the part that does anything?
- godelski 1y ago
  > They just spend all day figuring out how to connect things to other things and never write the part that does anything? I see a lot of people write software like this regardless of language. Like their job is to glue pieces of code together from stack overflow. Spending more time looking for the right code that kinda sorta works than it would take to write the code which will just work.
  - astrange 1y ago
    At least they get there. I was thinking about two types of people; one gets distracted and starts writing their own UI framework and standard library and never gets back to the program. The other starts writing a super-flexible plugin system for everything because they're overly concerned with developing a community to the point they don't want to actually implement anything themselves. (In this space the first was a few different mplayer forks and the second was gstreamer.)

Seems so easy! You only need the entire world even tangentially related to video to rely solely on your project for a task and you too can have all the developers you need to work on performance!

ackfoobar 1y ago

I seem to recall that they lamented on twitter the low amount of (monetary or code) contribution they got, despite how heavily they are used.

lo_zamoyski 1y ago
No one is forcing them to produce code for free. There is something toxic about giving things away for free with the ulterior motive of getting money for it.
- imchillyb 1y ago
  It’s market manipulation, with the understanding that free beats every other metric. Once the competition fails, the value extraction process can begin. This is where the toxicity of our city begins to manifest. Once there is no competition remaining we can begin eating seeds as a pastime activity. The toxicity of our city; our city. How do you own the world? Disorder. Disorder…
godelski 1y ago
They have some fire tweets, especially when people say they write things from scratch or boast about how much money they make with ffmpeg wrappers https://x.com/FFmpeg/status/1775178803129602500 https://x.com/FFmpeg/status/1775178803129602500 https://x.com/FFmpeg/status/1856078171017281691 https://x.com/FFmpeg/status/1856078171017281691 https://x.com/FFmpeg/status/1950227075576823817 https://x.com/FFmpeg/status/1950227075576823817 Oh, and here's one making fun of HN comments. Hi ffmpeg :) https://x.com/FFmpeg/status/1947076489880486131 https://x.com/FFmpeg/status/1947076489880486131
hdgvhicv 1y ago
Wasn’t that a trillion dollar company demanding support for their little problem?

hluska 1y ago

You know friend, if open source actually worked like that I wouldn’t be so allergic to releasing projects. But it doesn’t - a large swath of the economy depends on unpaid labour being treated poorly by people who won’t or can’t contribute.

astrange 1y ago

ffmpeg has competition. For the longest time it wasn't the best audio encoder for any codec[0], and it wasn't the fastest H.264 decoder when everyone wanted that because a closed-source codec named CoreAVC was better[1]. ffmpeg was however, always the best open-source project, basically because it had all the smart developers who were capable of collaborating on anything. Its competition either wasn't smart enough and got lost in useless architecture-astronauting[2], or were too contrarian and refused to believe their encoder quality could get better because they designed it based on artificial PSNR benchmarks instead of actually watching the output. [0] For complicated reasons I don't fully understand myself, audio encoders don't get quality improvements by sharing code or developers the way decoders do. Basically because they use something called "psychoacoustic models" which are always designed for the specific codec instead of generalized. It might just be that noone's invented a way to do it yet. [1] I eventually fixed this by writing a new multithreading system, but it took me ~2 years of working off summer of code grants, because this was before there was much commercial interest in it. [2] This seems to happen whenever I see anyone try to write anything in C++. They just spend all day figuring out how to connect things to other things and never write the part that does anything?

godelski 1y ago
> They just spend all day figuring out how to connect things to other things and never write the part that does anything? I see a lot of people write software like this regardless of language. Like their job is to glue pieces of code together from stack overflow. Spending more time looking for the right code that kinda sorta works than it would take to write the code which will just work.
- astrange 1y ago
  At least they get there. I was thinking about two types of people; one gets distracted and starts writing their own UI framework and standard library and never gets back to the program. The other starts writing a super-flexible plugin system for everything because they're overly concerned with developing a community to the point they don't want to actually implement anything themselves. (In this space the first was a few different mplayer forks and the second was gstreamer.)