FFhistory: helpers

I’ve tried to mention various developers who made the project better but there are still some people worth mentioning. Some of them have contributed next to none or no code at all but they helped in other ways. Now is a good occasion to mention them.

  • James Almer—he has been performing an important janitorial work (security fixes, small refactorings and such). For some reason he left an impression of being too reasonable and level-headed to be in FFmpeg (maybe it’s just me though, but I think it’s either the project needs more people like him or he deserves a better project);
  • Piotr Bandurski (aka ami_stuff)—the guy has a passion for finding old formats and asking to support them. If there are no samples he encodes them himself. It may not seem much but it saves significant time for people who do reverse engineering (plus creates an occupation for people like me);
  • compn (aka awesome beard)—another MPlayer old-timer who did the same (and probably still does) but started earlier. And he also liked to spell-check the documentation along with Mike Melanson and Diego Biurrun;
  • Andreas Cadhalpun—also known for performing janitorial work;
  • Stephan Gehrer—wrote a decoder for AVS (Chinese clone of H.264) as part of hardware decoder validation at work and donated the code;
  • Nicolas George—I don’t know who he is but in the project rules it should be written that he is always right. Otherwise he wastes too much time constantly proving it to the others;
  • Ivan Kalvachev—yet another MPlayer developer, he reverse engineered X8 coding scheme used in WMV2 and WMV3 and also maintained XvMC, an early hardware accelerated video decoding scheme. He admitted that he done the former mostly to get a hold in the project and annoy Diego. Many people try not to remember him because of his personality but he had done nothing wrong to me (and even recommended what anime to watch when I joined this FFmpeg/MPlayer community—it was mandatory at that time). I still somewhat regret not unbanning him on #ffmpeg-devel right before me leaving for #libav-devel (he asked for it but I refused—for the shameful reason of not knowing how to do that);
  • Sean McGovern—a nice Canadian guy (which looks like a tautology but there’s also Derek who constantly tried to be not nice and failed) who provided Sun machines to run FATE tests. Back in the day he was dissatisfied with his life (certain reasons prevented him from getting a better job), hopefully it’s better for him now;
  • Vladimir Pantelic (aka av500)—a developer from Archos with deep knowledge on embedded programming and certain formats (like ASF). He not only helped with some issues but also hanged around when we were gathering as a company, providing humor and wisdom;
  • Andreas Rheinhard—another guy responsible for a lot of janitorial work (is that a requirement to be named Andreas?);
  • Stefano Sabatini—I remember him doing janitorial jobs (fixing warnings, adding missing documentation bits and so on) and for his email signatures but he also plays an important administrative role in the project (being a treasurer and SPI liaison IIRC);
  • wm4—a developer who forked mpv from mplayer2 (a fork of MPlayer) and who was later kicked from the project for his strong opinion about the GNOME support. And I vaguely remember him leaving FFmpeg because of Carl Eugen Hoyos de-anonymising him. Before doing that he’s contributed a lot to the hardware-accelerated decoding support as well as other patches.

And there are various package maintainers from Linux distributions (not from all of them, but there were some e.g. from SuSE) whom I’d better not mention for ethical reasons—but they were part of the community at the time.

That’s about everybody I can think about save for one person…

Comments are closed.