Kostya's Boring Codec World

Since my previous question got a satisfying answer (even two) maybe I’ll get some answers for this question. It’s not been bugging me but it’s been with me for a long time.

First, the background. What we have:

• there’s a significant demand for video editing software for all those content creators on various video hosting platforms;
• there are some commercial products that got mentioned rather often (usually with complaints about their stability);
• there are some freeware or shareware products (less mentioned but you can see them in paid advertisements) that are built on opensource technologies (many of those have libavcodec in some form, one even turned MEncoder into .dll form; I checked the programs specifically to see if they have some interesting decoders bundled with, no luck so far);
• there are some open-source video editors as well like Cinelerra, Kdenlive or LiVES that keep existing in obscurity (AviSynth or Blender are more popular but they’re a different class of programs);
• most of the building blocks for input/output formats support or filters are already there (and if not I’m pretty sure Paul B. Mahol can add more on request);
• there’s a certain traffic cone shaped foundation (maybe VLC secretly stands for cône de Lübeck video) that is known for making an opensource video player that majority of people have heard of and use—on various platforms too;
• beside the player (which can also stream and do other things) they have supported other projects (like x264 or dav1d).

So the question (or rather a tree of related questions) is: why can’t those people organise and make a popular open-source video editor? Are they not interested in a product with less then ten million potential users? Are there any principal issues in creating a video editor that I’ve not seen (I remember VLME which did not even look like a serious attempt)? Or maybe there are some ideological reasons preventing its creation?

To me it looked like it’s possible to build an opensource video editor, it should use mostly the same blocks as video player, it should have some demand and it is possible to make a popular open-source product. So why it is not done, what I’m missing in the picture?

…and silence will be the answer.

Here’s another thing that has been bothering me for some time. As we all know RDBMSes more complex than SQLite have data management that is more complex than simply writing all data into one file sequentially plus you have database users belonging to different roles with different permissions on different databases. And you’re supposed to connect it via the usual networking mechanism even if you’re running it on the same machine. And advanced features include multi-machine interaction like sharding, replication and such.

So the question is: if this all looks like a standalone operating system then why enterprise-grade RDBMS are running as applications instead of their own OSes build on some kernel to manage CPU cores, storage and network interface? And in the age of containers we don’t really need to have an app version even for legacy version, just replace the driver (or merely its settings).

But maybe like the last time I wondered why GPUs do not have raytracing, I’ll learn that it’s a trend already and I’m just oblivious to it.