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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."
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.
google has actually helped out a ton for ffmpeg
google is why ffmpeg can now decode wmv3 and real codecs (rv3/4).
more info and list of projects:
http://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php?title=FFmpeg_Summer_Of_Code
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!!!
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.