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Comment by larodi | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone else on the opinion that ffmpeg now ranks 4th as the most used lib after ssl, zlib, and sqlite... given video is like omnipresent in 2025?

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FFMpeg is probably not as up high since video processing only needs to be done on the servers that receive media. I doubt most phones are running FFMpeg on video.

Chrome and Firefox use FFmpeg libraries to decode media, so it's in more places than you might think! (But also, ChatGPT said it's not used in Android browser apps because they would use Android's "native" media stack).

Well I would imagine portions of it are on every mobile device, and also Netflix and alike surely use it to encode video.

Curl should be up there, and "SSL" might be lower because of different implementations would split the numbers.

Curl perhaps yes, but it employs zlib and libssl to operate, right so?

Yes, it uses zlib and some implementation of SSL.

My earlier comment about "SSL" is that the actual library might be OpenSSL, BoringSSL, WolfSSL, GnuTLS, or any one of a number of others. So the number of uses of each one is smaller than the total number of "SSL" uses.

*sad curl noises

You can pull the nix logs from here: https://github.com/NixOS/infra/blob/main/metrics/fastly/READ...

Could be an interesting data source to explore that opinion.

You can check, at least for Arch Linux: https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/packages

It's up there in the hall of fame, that's for sure!

libcurl?

I think there's quite a few above it. Qt, libpng, libusb etc.

libpng and libjpeg I can see.

But Qt and libusb above ffmpeg? No way.

libc :D

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