FFmpeg at Meta: Media Processing at Scale

Those who benefit others deserve to be benefited in return — and if we could, we should help make them more fit.

Big tech companies can easily hire manpower to make proprietary versions of software, or just pay licensing fees for other proprietary software. They don’t rely on open source. Microsoft bought 86-DOS to produce MS-DOS; Microsoft paid the Unix license to produce Xenix; and when Microsoft hired former DEC people to make NT, it later paid DEC.

Instead, modern startups wouldn’t exist without open source.

Take a glance and contributor lists for your projects sometime.

This is the gold standard, sure. In practice, you end up maintaining a branch simply because upstream isn't merging your changes on your timescale, or because you don't quite match their design — this is completely reasonable on both sides, because they have different priorities.

Hard to say without being there, but in my experience it's very easy to end up in "we'll just patch this thing quickly for this use case" to applying a bunch of hacks in various places and then ending up with an out of sync fork. As a developer I've been there many times.

It's a big step to go from patching one specific company internal use case to contributing a feature that works for every user of ffmpeg and will be accepted upstream.

The typical situation is that you need to write a proof of concept internally and get it deployed fast. Then you can iterate on it and improve it through real world use. Once it matures you can start working on aligning with upstream, which may take a lot of effort if upstream has different ideas about how it should be designed.

I’ve also had cases where upstream decided that the feature was good but they didn’t want it. If it doesn’t overlap with what the maintainers want for the project then you can’t force them to take it.

Upstreaming is a good goal to aim toward but it can’t be a default assumption.

I really wonder if they couldn't have run the fork as an open source project. They present their options as binary when it fact they had many different options from the get go. They could have run the fork in an open-source fashion for developers of FFmpeg to see what their work was and be able to understand what the features they were working on was.

Keeping everything close source and then contributing back X amount of years later feels a little bit disingenuous.

Often when you are working on a downstream code base either you are inheriting the laziness of non-upstreaming of others or you are dealing with an upstream code base that’s really opinionated and doesn’t want many of your teams patches. It can vary, and I definitely empathize.

This can be harder than you think. Some time ago I worked a $BIGCORP and internally we used an open source library with some modifications to allow it to fit better into our architecture. In order to get things upstreamed we had to become official contributors AND lobby to get everyone involved to see the usefulness of what we were trying to do. This took a lot of back-and-forth and rethinking the design to make it less specific to OUR needs and more generally applicable to everyone. It's a process. I'm not surprised that Facebook's initial approach would be an internal fork instead of trying to play the political games necessary to get everything upstreamed right off the bat. That's exactly the situation we were in, so I get it.

and I know the teams love ffmpeg, there are some great folks at meta just not a lot in the c suite

doesn't matter how you worship ffmpeg if a company, which makes billions by destroying our society, gives a little bit of handout back.

So good for you? Bad for ffmpeg, society and the rest of the world.

This could not be more wrong. Meta is still using PHP AFAIK but I'm not sure it's modern. They created the Hack programming language ~10 years ago but it doesn't look like it's been updated in several years. Most of the improvements they touted were included in PHP 7 years ago.

If you, for some inexplicable reason, judge companies "the best" only based on their open source software and totally ignore everything else they do to society, while totally ignoring all the other companies who support open source software so much better, without doing all the evil shit that Facebook does (like React).

The rest of us don't bend over backwards so far and blindfold ourselves to harsh reality just to lick Zuckerberg's boots.