I traveled to a secret clubhouse today to take part in a clandestine meeting to discuss exactly how WebM will rule over all that you see and hear on the web. I can’t really talk about it. But I can show you the cool hat I got:
Yeah, you’re jealous.
The back of the hat has an Easter egg for video codec nerds– the original Duck Corporation logo (On2’s original name):
Former employees of On2 (now Googlers) were well-represented. It was an emotional day of closure as I met the person — the only person to date — who contacted me with a legal threat so many years ago. He still remembered me too.
I met a lot of people involved in creating various Duck and On2 codecs and learned a lot of history and lore behind then– history I hope to be able to document one day.
I’m glad I got that first rough draft of a toy VP8 encoder done in time for the meeting. It was the subject of much mirth.
were you able to ask google about youtube’s ffmpeg changes (off the record)?
i just like harassing the google people until i get some kind of answer, even if its ‘dont ask’ :D
reminds me of this quote:
christ , some honch in a cushy office on earth says go look at a grid reference
we look.
they dont say why, and i dont ask.
i dont ask because it takes 2 weeks to get an answer out here
and the answer is always ‘dont ask’.
I talked with a number of people from various organizations that leverage FFmpeg heavily. They told me all about the frustrations they have in dealing with upstream.
So, this cabal turns out to be THE “WebM Summit 2010”. Somehow, it made more sense to me when it was still called a cabal meeting…
@Mike: Could you elaborate?
First, Google never posted their (security) patches – we still have to “find” them ourselves. Later, they stopped offering the files that triggered their problems (note that they typically were 5k-10k multimedia files that just crashed, so claiming copyright reasons seems slightly far-fetched to me).
Their latest vorbis encoder patch (applied by me) seems to have make things much worse, btw.
The only other “organisation” I remember posting on -devel lately is Orange, and, well, lets no be too outspoken here…
I’d prefer to see the engineers push some -devel patches, rather then embroidered propaganda.