The universal multimedia toolkit. A diverse, community-driven project; posts are by individuals.
- Tweets 4,704
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- Followers 117,339
- Likes 4,309
🔥FFmpeg 8.1 "Hoare" has been released!
It features experimental xHE-AAC Mps212 + MPEG-H decoding, EXIF metadata, LCEVC metadata, Vulkan compute ProRes/DPX codecs, D3D12 H.264/AV1 encoding + filters, Rockchip H.264/HEVC hwenc, IAMF Ambisonic mux/demux, new filters & more.
ffmpeg.org/download.html#rel…
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Sorry you don't like our codec implementations in VLC. Looking forward to seeing yours.
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It's important to remember that "technology influencers" can be bad role models. Many encourage people to be "fans of technology" instead of actual developers of technology.
Hot takes are easy, writing good code is not.
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The xz fiasco has shown how a dependence on unpaid volunteers can cause major problems. Trillion dollar corporations expect free and urgent support from volunteers.
@Microsoft @MicrosoftTeams posted on a bug tracker full of volunteers that their issue is "high priority"
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Professionals don't use FFmpeg and FFprobe. They use extremely expensive software that runs FFmpeg inside (and that vendor contributes nothing back)
Hey! I have a question.
Is FFprobe actually a reliable tool for analyzing media files?
Do professionals really use it in real projects or are there better alternatives?@FFmpeg
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FFmpeg is pleased to announce we are joining the @DOGE team!
We will be rewriting America's Social Security system in assembly language, for the highest performance possible.
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BREAKING: FFmpeg 100x speedup from handwritten assembly
13:55:30 <•haasn> rangedetect8_avx512: 121.2 (100.18x) that may be the biggest speedup I've seen so far
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Microsoft are at it again ;)
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A major blocker to free and open source multimedia is @isostandards.
ISO standards are behind an expensive paywall, making them impossible to access for volunteer developers in FFmpeg, or anyone wanting to learn about multimedia technology
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Not sure why but we have lots of new followers!
FFmpeg makes extensive use of hand-written assembly code for huge (10-50x) speed increases so we are providing assembly lessons to teach a new generation of assembly language programmers. Learn more here:
github.com/FFmpeg/asm-lesson…
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Arguably the most brilliant engineer in FFmpeg left because of this. He reverse engineered dozens of codecs by hand as a volunteer.
Then security "researchers" and corporate employees came along repeatedly insisted "critical" security issues were fixed immediately waving their CVEs.
This was hugely demotivating to the fun and enjoyment of reverse engineering.
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If projects like FFmpeg don't keep the art of high performance programming alive, this is the sea of mediocrity we'd otherwise live in
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FFmpeg makes extensive use of hand-written assembly code for huge (10-50x) speed increases and so we are providing assembly lessons to teach a new generation of assembly language programmers.
Learn more here:
github.com/FFmpeg/asm-lesson…
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If we don't keep raising awareness of low-level programming skills, the skillset will disppear forever under a sea of SDKs, binary blobs and proprietary chips.
C programming matters, assembly language matters.
Yes, we post a lot about programming languages and it gets people very excited and opinionated.
But we do this to raise awareness that there is still a place for low-level code outside of Operating System development.
FFmpeg still needs low-level optimisations to be fast
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Yet we receive essentially no support from these enterprises relative to the value we provide
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We would like to thank @Nithin0dha for the $100k donation to FFmpeg (pending)!
While this does not solve the funding problems behind FFmpeg and Open Source in general, it's a step forward to a sustainable future for Open Source Software.
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Your weekly reminder that FFmpeg powers all online video - Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Disney+, Netflix etc etc, all run FFmpeg underneath
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After politely requesting a support contract from Microsoft for long term maintenance, they offered a one-time payment of a few thousand dollars instead.
This is unacceptable.
We didn't make it up, this is what @microsoft @microsoftteams actually did:
trac.ffmpeg.org/ticket/10341…
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Zerodha's $100k donation to FFmpeg, while by their own admission not using it that much, makes it even more generous.
Companies with businesses depending on FFmpeg should (but probably won't) learn from such generosity.
Hi, our usage is minimal and limited to internal functions, nothing client-facing. But our donation was motivated by the simple fact that we view FFMPEG as globally critical infrastructure.
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Your weekly reminder that FFmpeg powers all online video - Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Disney+, Netflix etc etc, all run FFmpeg underneath
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🚨 FFmpeg 8.0 has been released! 🚨
It has many new features and bugfixes such as APV and ProRes RAW decoding, numerous Vulkan encoders and decoders, VVC decoding features etc.
We have also upgraded our project infrastructure.
ffmpeg.org/
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FFmpeg handwritten assembly language lessons being written.
This week you'll be able to try out te first lesson and submit feedback
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Let us know where your FFmpeg patches are.
There's a difference between being a "user of FFmpeg" and "developer of FFmpeg".
The latter gives you the right to hot takes like "The built in ones are awful". That's because you have the actual skills to write replacements.
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Writing scripts for a hugely unprofitable streaming service is not the flex you think it is.
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The lesson from the xz fiasco is that investments in maintenance and sustainability are unsexy and probably won't get a middle manager their promotion but pay off a thousandfold over many years.
But try selling that to a bean counter
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Big companies use our (known problematic) AAC encoder yet none are willing to sponsor improvements
YouTube doesn't use the built-in FFmpeg AAC encoder! They surely use Fraunhofer AAC which is high quality and available in FFmpeg via libfdk_aac in custom builds. The built-in FFmpeg AAC however has a bad reputation, it sounds horrible even at high bitrates and too bad SC uses it
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FFmpeg is installed on billions of devices and you use it hundreds of times per day without knowing.
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Hi @elonmusk, we hear you want hardcore video engineering at Twitter 2.0. At FFmpeg we've been doing hardcore video programming for decades (high performance hand written assembly etc.) Get in touch if you want to talk!
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Brought to you by FFmpeg.
H.264 4K and FFmpeg MPEG-TS default PIDs (FFmpeg service name removed).
a launch like you’ve never seen before
4K livestreaming is here
nitter.app/i/broadcasts/1OwxWXMRA…
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No.
(We might know a thing or two about reverse engineering video/audio codecs)
suppose we sent back 100 jpeg files to the year 1900
like with the binary printed out on paper, and a caption describing each image
suppose they put the top 1000 people in the world on the task
would they be able to reverse engineer jpeg encoding?
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In FFmpeg we still make extensive use of hand written assembly optimisations for massive speed improvements
Think Assembly code is useless to learn?
Age of Empires I+II used ~13,000 lines of x86 32-bit assembly code.
"The use of assembly in the drawing core resulting in a ~10x sprite drawing speed improvement over the C++ reference implementations, and AoE's drawing core was notably faster than competitors like StarCraft"
- Matt Pritchard, Lead Developer of AoE I+II
Compilers of that area did not take advantage of things like the cache architecture and UV pipes of the first Pentium processors, so they had to be hand written in assembly.
Another speedup came via hand-managing register usage carefully, to avoid "register starvation", which was even a problem with C++
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Now a 102x speed improvement using handwritten assembly
paste.debian.net/hidden/c6f7…
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Here's a great example from @GrassValleyLive. They proudly talk about their fast H.264 decoder (from FFmpeg) in Linkedin marketing yet violate FFmpeg's licence and ship FFmpeg as "nonfree and unredistributable"
Professionals don't use FFmpeg and FFprobe. They use extremely expensive software that runs FFmpeg inside (and that vendor contributes nothing back)
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FFmpeg plays basically every proprietary video format ever created because of reverse engineered video codecs.
Now the same game is happening for still images. It will end the same way.
Camera Makers Defend Proprietary RAW Formats Despite Open Standard Alternative ift.tt/tveKNGP
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The most interesting and accurate technical responses on X come from anonymous accounts with cartoon profile pictures, pictures of toast or other generic items.
The one with corporate headshots and ex-FAANG in their bios usually provide nothing of value.
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🧵
We have many new followers so let's summarise one of the goals of this account:
Many people think FFmpeg is just a command line utility but that's like saying astronomy is the study of telescopes.
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Interesting how the world has learnt what software optimisation looks like this week #deepseek
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Today is a good day to remind Operating System developers not to parse untrusted data like video in the kernel. Apple does this for example.
In addition to FFmpeg there are also heavily fuzzed libraries like libpng and libjpeg-turbo.
Also DO NOT PARSE VIDEO IN THE KERNEL OR RING 0. It never ends well.
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This is probably as close to a 20th Birthday as we can get.
Here's to 20 more years of open source multimedia! 🎉
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The name C++ suggests it's an improvement from C. C++ is a downgrade.
If you mean C++, then no, it's a language that doesn't know if it's a low-level language where you have to control everything or a high-lelvel language where you don't know what happens, and it takes mostly the worst of both worlds. No C++ in FFmpeg except forced by lib APIs.
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FFmpeg makes extensive use of hand-written assembly code for huge (10-50x) speed increases and so we are providing assembly lessons to teach a new generation of assembly language programmers.
Learn more here:
github.com/FFmpeg/asm-lesson…
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We are regularly asked "How do I get a follow from the FFmpeg X account"?
If you have a patch in the project you get a follow.
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Also, video transcoding is one of the most heavily used CPU operations run in the cloud. So it's very likely that FFmpeg makes up a substantial portion of all of cloud compute!
Thankfully the most costly functions are all written in hand optimised assembly.
Your weekly reminder that FFmpeg powers all online video - Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Disney+, Netflix etc etc, all run FFmpeg underneath
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Google Engineers are not very good at optimisation.
A bunch of basement dwellers beat them:
Our friends at dav1d showing us the value of specific domain knowledge.
dav1d was written by people in their basements, libgav1 was written by Google Engineers.
When people say we need to be more corporate, more professional, is the bottom line really what you want?
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His contribution to preserving millions of undecodable video files for generations to come is monumentally underappreciated.
But instead he's burnt out from dealing with the security "researchers" and corporate employees waving CVEs.
We will never get talent like that back.
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We take online video for granted in our lives but there are substantial technical challenges to make it happen (almost always using FFmpeg).
Followers of this account know we aim to raise awareness of these low-level technical challenges, in particular hand written assembly.
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Influencers talk a big game but forget we were on mailing lists and IRC before they were born
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The @isostandards tax pays for nice trips around the world explaining how important they are to politicians.
Meanwhile a 17-year old wanting to implement something in an open source project like FFmpeg can't.
On the agenda today at #COP29⤵️
🌍 How international standards are unlocking pathways to sustainable development and stronger climate commitments.
Join us:
📍 In-person: Standards Pavilion, Blue Zone, Area E, B15
💻 Online: iso.org/cop29
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Our assembly lessons are trending on @github !
We have nearly 10k stars.
FFmpeg makes extensive use of hand-written assembly code for huge (10-50x) speed increases and so we are providing assembly lessons to teach a new generation of assembly language programmers.
Learn more here:
github.com/FFmpeg/asm-lesson…
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This man knows a few things about programming.
It's no suprise he's talking about C and assembly.
Couldn't agree more with Linus here. Making your code running as fast as possible (or just faster than someone's else code) is the best feeling you can get from programming
The issue that it is extremely hard to find the project that will pay you for instruction level efficiency
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FFmpeg assembly lessons are now hosted on GitHub:
github.com/FFmpeg/asm-lesson…
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Your weekly reminder that FFmpeg powers all online video - Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Disney+, Netflix etc etc, all run FFmpeg underneath
(someone asked us to actually tweet this every week)
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April Fools!
The part which isn't funny is that FFmpeg is a project written by volunteers which receives essentially no funding from VC backed Silicon Valley companies who raise tons of money off the back of FFmpeg and build their products and services using FFmpeg.
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🚨FFmpeg 7.0 "Dijkstra" has been released!🚨
It has a native VVC decoder, IAMF support and multi-threaded CLI tool alongside hundreds of other improvements and new codecs, features, APIs and bugfixes.
ffmpeg.org/#pr7.0
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The current goal of the Linux Foundation is not to help critical open source infrastructure like FFmpeg.
It's to use the Linux name to legitimise fashionable corporate projects like 5G, Blockchain and "Content Provenance and Authenticity"
None have anything to do with Linux.
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Yes, we post a lot about programming languages and it gets people very excited and opinionated.
But we do this to raise awareness that there is still a place for low-level code outside of Operating System development.
FFmpeg still needs low-level optimisations to be fast
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Not everything revolves around business and "value".
Our mission is to play every multimedia file in the world. We are proud to accept hobby contributors for obscure 1990s codecs.
If trillion dollar corporations want things from volunteers, they have to pay for it.
I love how @FFmpeg is conducting themselves online.
It's a project that's created billions of dollars in actual value and has captured practically none of it.
Their stance seems to be simple: fund substantial development or STFU with the requests.
Pretty easy to understand.
If FFmpeg had a good leader that balanced itself, captured some of the created value as funding, and scaled the project to its deserved resources, it'd be a different situation; but that's not the case and there's no reason to expect more out of unpaid volunteers.
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