alt Hacker NewsFfmpeg has an exceptionally terrible track record when it comes to security. People have been throwing fuzzers at it for as long as I remember and coming back with a nearly inexhaustible supply of memory corruption bugs. Here's an effort by one Googler a decade ago:
https://security.googleblog.com/2014/01/ffmpeg-and-thousand-...
So, while it's a demo of the capabilities of LLMs, this should not be at all surprising. Ffmpeg is absolutely not something you should be running outside of a sandbox if you're touching any untrusted or user-supplied content. I know that people do, and these people are taking unreasonable risks.
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ffmpeg is also rather popular and delivers a lot of functionality. Its unlikely that you don't have it installed.
Yes, there are security issues but quite a few are not ffmpeg itself related - the input is pretty shabby or at least not exactly easy to deal with!
Obviously, they could do with some assistance and I'm sure you and I will both dive in with equal zeal.
They're also extremely hostile to security researchers who report these issues.
If there was a nearly inexhaustible supply of Indian security researchers emailing you a nearly inexhaustible supply of LLM slop daily, there is a point where you or I would stop caring too.
ffmpeg is Free Software. You are also free not to use it.
Oddly enough, despite all these endless grievances, no one has come up with a better or more capable tool, certainly not one that is freely available.
Evidently no one cares either, because most implementations of ffmpeg I've seen typically run it as root "because we have to". Don't worry we use Docker bro.
Is GStreamer a more secure alternative or does it just get a bit less attention than ffmpeg?