There is an old Saturday Night Live parody commercial from the later days of the U.S. phone company monopoly featuring Lily Tomlin as a phone company representative:
“So, the next time you complain about your phone service, why don’t you try using two Dixie cups with a string? We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the Phone Company.”
The reason I bring this up is because I participate in the FFmpeg project. FFmpeg is in a unique place among open source projects. Whereas, a common complaint against the open source paradigm is that there is too much duplicated effort among competing projects that all basically do the same thing while never matching or excelling beyond their proprietary counterparts, there is nothing else in the entirety of the software world like FFmpeg. Indeed, FFmpeg has a monopoly on do-everything multimedia manipulation programs.
Some people are distraught by this.
swfdec author Benjamin Otte has a blog post lamenting the problems of developing directly with FFmpeg. This finally prompted me to use my sucky research method against FFmpeg. The sucky research method works like this: Google for “XYZ sucks”, where XYZ is some software program, consumer product, or company in order to gauge the level of negativity against XYZ or perhaps to just commiserate with other chumps in the same boat as you. I most recently used this method to find other chumps as frustrated as me with both PHP and WordPress.
I discovered surprisingly few sites dedicated to hating FFmpeg. These stood out: FFMpeg strikes (again) and ffmpeg sucks. One comment even pointed out that there are no ffmpegsucks.tld domains registered yet, so I take that as a positive sign (hurry and register yours today!).
Most of the complaints center on the fact that there is still no central release authority or process for FFmpeg. My usual response to this is that the leadership of FFmpeg is committed to making releases eventually (this may seem non-committal but many people are still under the impression that the leadership is actively opposed to releases). It’s just that doing so takes work, planning and — get ready for it — testing. Honestly, why do you think I have been working on FATE? I want it to serve as a baseline to build confidence that the code, you know, actually works before we make any releases.
I’m not mad, though. It’s all right. I mean, seriously, what are people going to do about the situation? Refuse to use FFmpeg? Maybe fork the codebase? Heh, I dare you. FFmpeg is only as capable as the talent developing it. Better yet, is someone going to start a competing project from scratch to supplant FFmpeg? Seriously, get a grip and calm down before you hurt yourself, then we’ll talk about what we can all do together to improve FFmpeg and work toward a release schedule.
Unfortunately, we just got received a few thousand files that crash FFmpeg. That might push back the release schedule a bit. You want a reliable and secure multimedia backend library, I trust?
Related:
- The Intersection of Code and Money — examining how — and whether — financial sponsorship has helped FFmpeg