FFmpeg at Meta: Media Processing at Scale

> As our internal fork became increasingly outdated, we collaborated with FFmpeg developers, FFlabs, and VideoLAN to develop features in FFmpeg that allowed us to fully deprecate our internal fork and rely exclusively on the upstream version for our use cases.

Some comments seem to glance over the fact that they did give back and they are not the only ones benefitting from this. Could they give more? Sure, but this is exactly one of the benefits of open source where everyone benefits from changes that were upstreamed or financially supported by an entity instead of re-implementing it internally.

I hope when Fabrice Bellard retires, he's able to do so quite comfortably. So much money has been made on the back of his software creations.

tens of billions of executions per day is insane. i run ffmpeg a few thousand times daily for automated video assembly and even at that scale the process startup overhead is noticeable. the single-decode multi-output trick alone saved me like 40% wall time when i switched to it. cant imagine what those savings look like multiplied by 10 billion

> By running all encoder instances in parallel, better parallelism can be obtained overall.

This makes a lot of sense for the live-streaming use case, and some sense for just generally transcoding a video into multiple formats. But I would love to see time-axis parallelization in ffmpeg. Basically quickly split the input video into keyframe chunks then encode each keyframe in parallel. This would allow excellent parallelization even when only producing a single output. (And without lowering video quality as most intra-frame parallelization does)

> At the same time, new versions of FFmpeg brought support for new codecs and file formats, and reliability improvements, all of which allowed us to ingest more diverse video content from users without disruptions.

While it is good they worked to get their internal improvements into upstream, and this is certainly better behavior than some other unmentioned tech giants. It makes one wonder (since they are presumably running it tens of billions of times per day), if they were involved in supporting these improvements all along. If not, why not?

> As our internal fork became increasingly outdated

Oof. That is so relatable.

Also ffmpeg 8 is finally handling HDR and SDR color mapping for HDR perfectly as of my last recompile on Gentoo :)

Germany's sovereign tech fund has donated more to FFmpeg thanks meta.

Happily for the ffmpeg machines, it's all lightweight content. Something more heavy would overload them

Isn't this like telling the world you ate a full meal by eating samples at Costco? Meta is ranking in billions as we speak, they ensure the FOSS projects they rely on are properly funded instead of shovelling cash to bullshit datacentre developments. Otherwise we're basically guaranteed to end up with another XZ fiasco once again when some tired unpaid FOSS maintainer ends up trusting a random Jia Tan in their desperation

Where's the big donation?

Same HN post from 6 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47224355

[Edit: Why is anyone downvoting me linking to the previous post of this? What possible objection could you have to this particular comment?]

Wish they gave FFmpeg a decent chunk of money, words are cheap

[dead]

[dead]

Meta this is just SAD, Mark your company would be nothing without FF. Do the right thing and write a check today.