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Comment by QuarterRoy | Hacker News Reader

I love software that just does what it’s supposed to do and is so good at it that it’s an underpinning for other projects.

FFmpeg, curl, nmap, et., al.

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It is such a swiss knife kind of tool, there's just almost nothing it can't do when it comes to video, audio and image modifications.

I wonder how many big companies uses it "in secret" that we don't know off, or distributes it with mentions buried deep underneath usage agreement.

Google must be using it for Youtube. Wikimedia is using it as well.

I believe it is embedded in Chromium as well.

Firefox bundles it as well I think (at least Linux version).

Firefox vendors a subset of ffmpeg, to decode royalty free codecs such as vp8/9, mp3, flac, on all OSes. We're using our own decoders/demuxers for other royalty free codecs for historical reasons.

It can also use the system's ffmpeg to decode patented formats such as h264 or AAC, on desktop Linux, if the copy of ffmpeg present on the host includes non-free codecs (same on other OSes, with their respective system libraries).

They do, they say so here: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171#zippy=%2Cc...

> YouTube does not recommend the RGB color matrix on uploads. In this case, YouTube initially sets the color matrix to unspecified before the standardization. It will then infer the color matrix using the color primaries during standardization. Note that sRGB TRC will convert to BT.709 TRC. YouTube re-tags the color primaries/matrix/TRC to BT.709 when it is not supported by FFmpeg colorspace conversion filter.

Since FFmpeg is gpl2.1 I thought they had to make it easier to know they're using this, like under a "licenses" section, but I don't see anything under studio.youtube.com indicating this.

Interesting, thanks for the pointer!

> Since FFmpeg is gpl2.1 I thought they had to make it easier to know they're using this

Precisely, I doubt youtube just brazenly ignored this, but their legal might have buried it under some obscure link. I wonder if there's a license that require it to be "highly visible" in some sort of way.

Isn't it that they're not actually distributing FFmpeg, just using it themself, so they don't need to do anything?

Huh, I never really thought about it, but I guess that's one thing that GPL kinda fails at: if your server does all the work, you can leverage open source technology to do all sorts of stuff for your clients, so long as all the work the code you serve them does is collect and present data to the server.

Like, they get to see the code they run, but there's no insight to the code you run to deliver whatever service you're doing. Maybe this is obvious to other people lol, I just hadn't thought of it till now.

Yes, this is the reason AGPL was created. With AGPL software you have to open your changes, even if you don't distribute it and only use it serverside. There are still nuances, but this is the main gist.

This is known as "Tivoisation" (after a dead set top box company), and is the driving motivation behind GPLv3 and some other licenses adding terms to cover this.

Not really. Tivoisation is the process of locking your device down with hardware (or other means), so it will only run software signed with your keys.

So the end user can have all the source code they want and still be helpless.

That issue with the GPLv2 was fixed with V3.

I can tell you it’s heavily used in professional settings within the entertainment industry. There is no better tool, thankfully!

It’s used heavily by professional broadcasters and TV/movie studios. AWS run it, satellite TV services use it, some VFX studios use it, etc. it’s become pretty foundational industry tech.

And even the defense industry.

YouTube appears to have used ffmpeg, at least in 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2831292

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