On August 14th 2004 Mike Melanson committed to FFmpeg a decoder for TSCC codec that I sent to him. So on that day my official story of contributing to open-source multimedia has started.
A lot has changed since then and not always to the best. Back then there were a plenty of formats to reverse engineer (with quite a demand for them as well), nowadays it feels like there’s one standard video codec (or two, if you see AV1 as different enough) and Fraunh*fer Alternative-to-Opus Audio Codec (or ***-AAC for short). And the complexity increased so that it’s increasingly harder to implement a codec alone.
From the software side things have changed as well, I’ve ranted about it enough. To put it simply, I’ve not been participating in FFmpeg (or libav) development for the last decade and I don’t regret it at all.
And yet I still have the curiosity about various multimedia formats so I keep investigating them and sharing the results with the public. I’m not sure I’ll find enough material to last for another twenty years but there are still enough obscure games out there. Occasionally my work comes in handy for somebody else and it makes me happy (not as happy as with my first contribution, that happiness lasted for a week—but I was much younger and very inexperienced back then). That’s both the curse and the blessing of being an expert on a very narrow topic: hardly anybody needs you but when they do they have no other option. So I’ll keep providing what I can as long as possible and let’s see how it ends…
Wow! 2 decades! Congratulations. I’m proud to have played a role in such a life-changing event for you. 🙂 For some reason, I thought you started contributing earlier, but I guess I was fencing multimedia code for multiple “straw contributors” for years at that point.
Well, there’s a reason why I sent my code to you (and kept doing that for some months afterwards) instead of the proper way. You had a name back then and were involved in various projects directly (like Xan) as well as proxying other codecs like Indeo 3 or VMD (or even Smacker even if that happened later).
Will it after next ten years there be “Thirty years” blog entry?
How long this will run on fumes of old “glory”?
Keep it going, just allocate less personal time on it.
If I don’t lose interest, the next post will probably be at a round thirty two years anniversary.
And thanks for the concern, but it’s not something I do in all my free time anyway. I have other hobbies as well (and more than half of them does not involve sitting at computer at all), otherwise I’d probably be burned out by now.