FFmpeg 6.1 released | Hacker News Reader

FFmpeg 6.1 released

ffmpeg.org

140 pointsgyan35 comments

What a fantastic project. It’s FOSS like this that makes the world go round. If only the original vision of the internet had been fulfilled, we’d have hundreds more projects like it.

What is the original vision of the internet?

Porn. Porn everywhere. And cat videos. But mostly porn.

Cats. Porn. Cat porn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUf7boHvejQ

A government project to allow researchers to access distant mainframes.

That any two consenting parties may communicate directly with one another.

Why do people bring up some vague ideology? Imagine a world without the internet being invented, what a nice world to live now.

Effective ways for US military to communicate between missile silos?

After that, i'd say ITS and their networked machine list sharing code and cool hacks, being the proto free-software movement.

There are hundreds more projects like it. Projects like GIMP, ImageMagick, Apache, curl, GCC, LLVM, Firefox, Thunderbird, KDE, Linux, the BSDs, etc., etc.

There are many massively useful things available as free and open source software.

>Firefox

Definitely not. It certainly no longer belongs in "the original vision of the internet" category. Not when it wants to be a part of evil forces seeking to police the internet.

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...

https://www.eutimes.net/2021/01/thousands-are-uninstalling-f...

https://reclaimthenet.org/firefox-maker-mozilla-calls-for-mo...

But Firefox protects you from advertising networks the best. uBlock Origin works best in Firefox:

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

Sounds like "the original vision of the internet" to me.

I initially did not want to bring this up, but Firefox literally changed my default search engine from DuckDuckGo to Google after I updated it yesterday.

No opt-in, no user input, no warning, no nothing. Just shoved Google down the user's throat.

Do you know where Mozilla gets its money from?

I update Firefox all the time and it doesn't change my default search engine. Now what?

Are you using Mozilla's Firefox builds or a Linux distribution's builds of Firefox?

Win10 119.0.1 (64-bit)

Doesn't happen for me on Windows or macOS. It sounds a lot like you're construing an anecdotal incident as a grand conspiracy.

I don't think that was due to Mozilla pushing Google. I have Firefox configured with DuckDuckGo on all my devices and this has never happened to me on an update.

You mean the least worst?

No, I mean the best. Firefox provides features that uBlock Origin uses that other browsers don't provide.

Better than all other major browsers != good

Since the only real competition is chromium, safari, and edge, the bar is astoundingly low.

Thank you!

And blocking all extensions by default on Firefox mobile.... At least you can create an add-on collection to bring them back but Mozilla is evil nowadays.

Hrm: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2023/11/01/is-your-extension...

They're doing exactly the opposite of what you think they're doing.

Looks like a bunch of Vulkan decoders and filters have been added. Nice!

ffmpeg is absolutely wonderful, but some combination of its originating era, long history, and compatibility commitments (how many convoluted production ffmpeg scripts exist out in nature?) have made its CLI pretty rough.

This is maybe "known" to the current audience, but chatGPT is an excellent soundboard for crafting ffmpeg scripts to do pretty much anything - makes the tool about 10 times as accessible to me.

Thank you for mentioning chatgpt, it is great way to get the job done

A lot of that is essential complexity of the problem space - media is HARD: so many different specs, each one interpreted differently by each vendor.

In case you're not aware, though, there has been work on improving the CLI - it was discussed on HN[1] earlier this week, and there's an excellent video[2] linked in that thread with an overview from Anton

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38160703

2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4DS3jiZhfo&t=1245s

Thank you!

You may be right about essential vs accidental complexity - my domain knowledge is too weak to have an opinion - I just get the subjective impression of "holy crap this makes git feel like my mother tongue".

I can't speak to the CLI, but the C API is pretty stable in my experience. I just upgraded my ffmpeg dependency from a really old version to 6.1 with zero issues (except a few benign deprecated warnings)

VAAPI AV1, raw AC-4 and VVC mux and demux, hell yeah!

Interesting to see Playdate video decoder in there

I thought so too!

Are there any good ts/js wrappers for this that make producing animations and transitions a bit easier? I find the cli args syntax hard to work with. Like pythons moviePy

https://pypi.org/project/moviepy/

Will the vaapi av1 encoder work (well) with Intel Arc? I was trying to build ffmpeg cartwheel and was up until sunrise because I had to build some other dependency of another dependency. Meanwhile the vaapi h264 (or was it 265?) encoder played quite nice with my rdna2 card.

> RISC-V optimizations for many parts of our DSP code have been merged, with mainly the large decoders being left.

Cool. Remembering the recent Phoronix RISC-V benchmarking, wonder how much of an improvement these optimisations will make...

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