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chemotaxislast Saturday at 9:54 PM1 replyview on HN

The somewhat depressing reality is that if you're running ffmpeg on user-supplied multimedia without putting it in a bulletproof sandbox, you're just bound to have a bad time.

Video decoding is one of these things that no one seems to know how to do safely in C or C++, not in the long haul. And that's probably fine, because we have lightweight sandboxing tech that makes this largely moot - but there's an extra step you need to take. Maybe it's on the ffmpeg project that they don't steer people in that direction.

Trying to fix these bugs piecemeal is somewhat pointless - or at least, we've been trying for several decades, throwing a ton of manpower and compute at it, and we're still nowhere near a point where you could say "this is safe".


Replies

ozgrakkurtyesterday at 10:45 AM

Does this mean we have to run vlc in a sandbox while watching a downloaded film?

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