Archive for January, 2023

FFhistory: Michael Niedermayer

Tuesday, January 3rd, 2023

And now is finally the time when we should discuss the man who made FFmpeg into what it is today: large, successful and toxic mess. The man who was the project leader for a long time and definitely-not-project-leader since. Of course I’m talking about Michael Niedermayer.

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FFhistory: hosting and admins

Sunday, January 1st, 2023

As I mentioned in the prologue, not so long after FFmpeg went public it was spotted by MPlayer which offered developers, hosting and after a while the project was fully migrated from from SourceForge to mplayerhq.hu.

So the people responsible for hosting and administration of the server played a very important role in FFhistory. Here are the people I can think of:

  • Árpi (Árpád Gereöffy, the creator of MPlayer);
  • Diego Biurrun;
  • Reimar Doeffinger;
  • Janne Grunau (mostly a co-admin in libav times);
  • Dr. Attila Kinali;
  • Michael Niedermayer (has to do it since the times FFmpeg went independent);
  • Måns Rullgård (he’s also responsible for hosting almost all of non-x86 FATE machines and overall FATE infrastructure).

IIRC the hosting story went like this: at first Árpi was hosting and administrating everything, then he retired leaving the server in care of Biurrun-Kinali-Rullgâ triumvirate. The provider switched from a Hungarian one which owned favours to Árpi to a Swiss one that owned favours to Dr. Kinali. After the split FFmpeg had to search for a new hosting as the admins stayed with libav, so for a while Árpi managed to provide it. Eventually though he could not do it any longer and some Bulgarian ISP stepped in and the server is managed by another group of ex-MPlayer developers. Additionally Git hosting for FFmpeg is provided by VideoLAN (somewhat because of the split and fight for the project name).

Most of these people have contributed to the project more in various other roles so I’ll talk only about the two of them—Árpi and Attila.
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Ukrainian Christmas

Sunday, January 1st, 2023

Ukraine has a long and tumultuous history and there are actually four different dates which essentially serve for Christmas celebration:

  • December 19—Saint Nicholas Day (Julian calender). Instead of putting presents into socks later, St. Nicholas sneaks them under pillows while children are sleeping. Very popular in the Western Ukraine;
  • December 25—Christmas by Gregorian calender. Not that popular but it’s slowly gaining popularity thanks to the actions of russia;
  • January 7—Christmas by Julian calender. Traditional for the Eastern Orthodox Christian Church (though many people would gladly celebrate it on both dates);
  • and the 1st of January—the date selected by Soviet Union to replace Christmas celebrations with something secular. But now it’s getting a very different meaning…

In the year 1909 on the very first day of January a boy was born in a small Ukrainian village (then under Austro-Hungarian rule). He has not managed to do enough yet his deeds made him a religious figure, feared in russia and (mostly for that reason) praised in Ukraine. Of course I’m talking about Stepan Bandera.

His biography can be condensed to this: he was born in a Ukrainian priest family with a history of cultural and political activism, so it was natural for him to join political movements that were fighting for the independence of Ukraine; later he became an important member of the Organisation of the Ukrainian Nationalists. After the internal disagreements OUN was split into two wings named after their leaders—Melnyk and Bandera. Bandera’s OUN was also called OUN-R(evolutionary) since they believed that Ukrainian independence can be won only through war (as 2022 demonstrated, they were right). In order to achieve that goal OUN-B cooperated with National-Socialistic Germany against International-Socialistic USSR and on the 30th of June 1941 they tried to declare the restoration of Ukrainian state. Germans tolerated puppet states on Yugoslavian territory but not here, so many of the Ukrainian activists were arrested and put to prisons—including Stepan Bandera himself who was at the same concentration camp as Andriy Melnyk. Couple of years later he was released in hope that he could be useful in fighting against USSR. He remained in Germany and was involved in political activism until the assassination by a KGB agent in 1954.

So what was his main contribution that made him immortal? Making OUN-R into an organisation that formed Ukrainian Insurgent Army and fought against Soviet occupation until late 1950s. Of course Soviet propaganda made them all into arch-enemies and in this way preserved his name for the future generations. Similarly Ukrainians started to perceive the same things as something good and accepted this new Bandera identity.

I called Stepan Bandera a religious figure because most of the people who use his name have no idea who he really was, what he has done (beside abstract “fought for Ukrainian independence”) or what his views are. russians fling Banderite as an insult at anybody speaking Ukrainian (which should be a giveaway for their chauvinism already), some still believe he’s alive (so how is this not a religion?). But if you look at his actual views (or what is passed for them), you’ll see that they were adopted in USSR and russia (single-party state with the leading role of one nation) but not Ukraine (actually even back in the 1940s Ukrainian Insurgent Army ditched them already). Now throw in the fact that his birthday in still a state holiday in russia and you’ll see a religion in forming.

Слава Україні! Героям слава!