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0 pointsbkaid15y ago0 comments

And the countless crappy paid windows video converter apps that don't credit FFMpeg and all they do is do shell out to ffmpeg. I get a chuckle out of the the FFMpeg wall of shame (which is honestly smaller than it should be): http://www.ffmpeg.org/shame.html

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4 comments · 2 top-level

Locke168915y ago· 2 in thread

I'm almost more OK with that than the VLC people. It's not that I have anything against VLC, but they recently did an AMA on Reddit and it kind of rubbed me the wrong way. The primary thing the VLC team gets credit for is being able to play pretty much anything you throw at it, but that's the product of a lot of DSP work that me and mostly a ton of other people a lot more talented than me did. If VLC came out and said "we make graphics frontends and command line options" that would be one thing, but there was a trend to accept the praise without coming out and saying that they weren't responsible for most of the work. It was especially frustrating for me because I actually dislike a lot of the UI/UX decisions that VLC made, which was their primary contribution to the media player.

I understand it when unscrupulous people rip off FFmpeg, but I had hoped there would be more honor among fellow OSS developers.

jbk15y ago

Please, stop spreading FUD.

First, we didn't do an AMA on Reddit.

Then, the UI/UX part of VLC is around 1/30th of the VLC codebase (not counting external libraries) and most of the code is demuxers, decoders, protocol handlers (all custom), video outputs, video filter, clock, audio filters and libraries wrapper (not only libavcodec).

Did you actually look at the codebase before saying things like this?

Then, VLC developers have worked on libavcodec, like for DxVA2 acceleration, and have been telling people to add codecs inside libavcodec, and not directly VLC.

> there was a trend to accept the praise without coming out

Where did you see that "trend" ?

Finally, I don't see what your work is on FFmpeg or other such libraries.

Locke168915y ago

Edit: You know what, just disregard my first comment. It's mostly me being bitter and isn't productive at all. The solution is to have the projects work better together, not whine about who deserves the most credit.

I apologize, you're right. I actually went back to look at it and it was all non-VLC people misrepresenting FFmpeg and VLC.

I didn't mean to say that VLC doesn't do anything important, I just felt that FFmpeg gets less credit than it deserves because it is less user-facing.

As to the codebase and FFMpeg contributions: I actually have a patch sitting around that makes substantial bug fixes and improvements to the OS X VLC. Part of this was a result of my work in FFMpeg improving crash and corruption resilience. I wouldn't have worked on this if I didn't feel that VLC is a good project, so I apologize if you thought my comment misrepresented the project or the developers. It was simply meant to express a general frustration at the lack of recognition of FFMpeg developers.

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jawngee15y ago

Almost all of the apps in the video category on the Mac app store are the same.

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