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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 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!!!
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?
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
It works VERY well. Decoding a 1080p H.264 video using software on my dual-core 3GHz machine pegs the cores back and forth to around 80-90%, but plays fairly well. Using an mplayer build patched to support VDPAU, my CPU remains idle (clock drops to 1GHz, and 1-3% CPU usage) and plays equally as well, if not better. Furthermore, I was still able to go about my business with no noticeable impact on performance, even when using hardware-dependent Compiz. I have not though, tried this on multiple streams.
Oh, and this is using some cheap NVidia 8600 something-or-other card that I picked up new for ~$50. I, for one, was truly impressed by VDPAU and what it means for low-cost HD content.
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.