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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Sidenote: over the years I haven't seen a Linux utility crash so often as ffmpeg; not by a wide margin. So when calling this library, it is probably wise to assume that it may not return.

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I use ffmpeg to transcode video, perhaps 10,000 times in the past year (part of an automated pipeline). It has failed about 50 times or so, almost every failure down to corrupted input and not a crash per se. It has deadlocked about 200 times, often enough that my tools monitor the log file I redirect output to and restart the job if too long passes without progress.

I'm amazed it's as stable as it is, given the complexity of video formats. Of course crashes are also potential security problems - I sometimes wonder how far you could get with a malicious video spread virally (in the social sense).

Probably good to document those use cases, collect sample clips and contribute back back to the project as test cases.

Help improve the project for everyone.

I've made efforts in the past, but often I can't legally redistribute the problematic data. If the problem is obvious enough, I try and clean-room recreate it.

> often enough that my tools monitor the log file I redirect output to and restart the job if too long passes without progress.

Do you mind sharing an example of how you accomplish this?

By utility, I assume you mean the CLI binary. There have been issues with filtergraph buffer management in the past year or so, but other than that, ffmpeg rarely crashes. What sort of commands crash for you?

Same here, I've rarely ever had anything that links ffmpeg crash, and I have a lot of ancient videos in old formats laying around.

Crash? Or notice and signal an error? I use it all the time and cannot remember it crashing in a bad way (because otherwise I would remember creating a bug report).

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