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An Interview With the Developers of FFmpeg
An anonymous reader writes "Following the long-awaited release of FFmpeg 0.5, Phoronix has conducted an interview with three FFmpeg developers (Diego Biurrun, Baptiste Coudurier, and Robert Swain) about this project's recent release. In this interview they talk about moving to a 3/6-month release cycle, the criteria for version 1.0, Blu-Ray support on Linux, OpenCL and GPGPU acceleration, multi-threading FFmpeg, video APIs, their own video codecs, and legal challenges they have run into."
They say they have trouble implementing code due to time and motivational constraints. Seems to me that if Google/YouTube has built a very successful website around the FFmpeg engine then Google ought to pony up some programming help with improving the project. Wouldn't that be "The right thing to do" (TM)?
Define "Long" and who was waiting for something that is still ".5" beta?
It is not in "beta", it is production quality. The fact that it is 0.5 indicates that it is not complete and perfect yet.
Oh, it is just another CODEC library.
It is not "just another", it is the most important and most used open-source codec library
It only takes one man to change the Wisdom of the Crowd to Tyranny of the Masses.
It's the "complete" part of that word that is the key one. I dare say that no software is ever going to be "perfect" ... or, for that matter, "complete" in the ultimate sense of the word. However, I'm guessing they have a list of functionality that they want to implement before they declare it to be FFmpeg 1.0; fulfilling their list of desired functionality makes it "complete."
It's a bit more than a codec library - without it you probably wouldn't have Youtube or VLC, as well as countless other online and offline applications.
No one would expect you to be grateful, but you might want to demonstrate some knowledge of a domain you're so quick to pass comment on.
First, it is (arguably) the best out there.
Second, it is an extremely powerful, cross-platform transcoder for every format under the sun.
Third, it is an extremely diverse media player (mplayer)
Fouth, it is the bassis for a countless number of media player and transcoding projects.
As someone who manipulates digital video on both a person and professional level, ffmpeg is the #1 tool in my arsenal.
Congrats on 0.5!!!
Don't confuse ffmpeg with libavcodec. Although libavcodec is part of of the ffmpeg distribution, and is used by many other program (mplayer especially), ffmpeg is more than that.
Saying FFMPEG is just a codec library is like saying a Ferrari is a shiny surface for adhering horsie stickers to.
The distinguishing features of FFMPEG are that it's cross-platform (many commercial Windows and Mac apps use it under the hood), it's astonishingly fast at transcoding, has very broad codec AND container support, is fairly simple yet has a very rich set of advanced features.
What other tool are you going to use to convert your AutoDesk Animator video library to Flash video and animated gifs?
Anyone know what kind of performance increase VDPAU can give compared with software decoding?
That application I'm working on needs to decode lots of H.264 streams so being able to offload that to a GPU would be a godsend.
Who modded parent insightful?
Numbers indicate nothing more than sequential release numbers.
You must be really distressed at Microsoft's race from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95, to Windows 2000, only to plummet back down to Windows 7.
Wait, maybe there is some significance to these numbers after all.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
ffmpeg is to video, what imagemagick is to images.
http://www.mhall119.com
mplayer != ffmpeg. a "codec library" == the bassis for a countless number of media player and transcoding projects. I do not think these words mean what you think they mean. ffmpeg is primarily a codec. Encoder, and decoder. You might more accurately say it is a codec package because it provides the ffmpeg program (and others) and a collection of libraries (libavcodec, libavformat...) The package also provides a player, muxer, and a streamer; the player is ffplay, not mplayer.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Right. What is FFMPEG? It's basically a package that allows you to convert from almost any audio or video file format to almost any audio or video file format. Not only that, but it's the audio/video converter that pretty much every other (excluding in-house proprietary) converters and players are based on. It's important.
As to why we care about a 0.5 release, FFMPEG has been around for years, but to my knowledge has not had "releases". There is the latest build, and that's it. The idea of having a stable "release" build is news in itself, whatever number you associate to it.
Yes, there's still a lot to do, so the 0.5 version number is probably warranted. For one thing, there are still a few formats out there that FFMPEG doesn't fully support, and not all of those that they support seem to have been optimized well enough for output quality IMO. However, it's amazing how much they've accomplished already. Life would be so much harder if not for these guys' work.
hall of shame
Pretty good, you can easily decode 1080p H264 video with a cheap nvidia card. It is also consume less power and cooler than using CPU for decoding, so VDPAU = great for HD video on laptop.
I also find it interesting that VDPAU can help decoding H264 video that I can't decode using its counterpart on Windows (DxVA) :)
In the "Legal Issues" section of the article, I expected to see something about the issue of FFMPEG potentially infringing on existing patents. Instead there's just some stuff about violating the GPL. Seems like a major oversight to me.
What *is* up with the patent issue? Is it possible to use FFMPEG legally in commercial software if you adhere to the GPL and buy licenses for the patents that you're using? Since I already paid for software that includes encoders for some of these patented codecs, does that allow me to legally use FFMPEG? In my lifetime, how many times do I have to pay the patent fees for MPEG2 encoding?
It's like the FFmpeg of images.
No existe.
-O3 and -funroll-loops are likely to increase code size, and thus increase cache pressure. Particularly for H.264 this in our limited experience is more likely to slow things down that speed them up. Generally it is a bad idea to "speed-optimize" without benchmarking.