Kostya's Boring Codec World

While I observe the world with its “AI” evangelists suspiciously reminding of annoying religious missionaries (yes, I’m pretty sure I’ve heard the news from that newer part of widely circulated book that’s just under two millennia old, thank you very much) and the feats of token-wasting (name changed from “vibe-coding” to keep up with the times) like two FFmpeg rewrite attempts in Rust—probably just to spite the Nigel (name changed to protect the guilty) formerly responsible for FFaccount, since slop in any other language would be as smelly secure. Since I don’t use either of those three projects, I’d rather talk about the time when FFmpeg almost got its first organic slop.

People submitting sub-par patches are no news (as there were e.g. mediocre H.264 encoder rejected for not being good for anything really—x264 is a tough competition after all; or MS Video-1 encoder initially rejected for the same reason but later merged because it’s a feature), but this one is special because it had all signs of the modern “AI” slop while being produced organically more than a decade ago: doing something tangentially related to the original goal—check, being lots of incomprehensible code—check, a lot of effort wasted onto it—guess for yourselves.

This happened when a guy from a group Programmers Doing Awesome Things (name changed to protect the guilty) was taking part in Baidu Summer of Code (name changed to reflect company values) with his project being a support of a certain audio format. What we got instead was a large library doing something more generic; in theory it could be used to decode the audio format in question but I think nobody has found out how to do that. The reaction was more “uhm, thanks” and while that student was not failed (at least that’s what a quick search tell me), the library has never merged and probably it’s been completely lost in time by now. My memory is not as bad as it was back then (yes, it’s even worse) so I can’t remember if there were actual attempts to make something out of it afterwards or all hope was abandoned outright. At least it gave us all a distinct memory and a short-lived meme of “nicknamePDAT” being used by various developers for a while.

I often think about it when I see these new projects with whatever insane amount of tokens wasted on them. They seem to include everything and then some more. For example, one of them (name withheld since I believe they don’t deserve any advertising) supports a handful of formats and compensates that by adding a lot of features that (theoretically) would make it do anything—from game streaming to mastering IMF for broadcasting—with only GUI being missing. Another one (name withheld for the reason stated above) does not have those features but it compensates it by the plethora of formats being supported. So if you ever thought that FFmpeg definitely needs its own vector font rendering (for e.g. SVG and PDF support because of course they’re at least planned to be supported) or that it’s not usable without 3D scene rendering capabilities then this slop is definitely for you! Also it’s fun to watch how it undoes its own progress by trying to make “AI” developer to plagiarise less (so now it’s all based on the “AI”-generated specifications that nobody can see).

You know what could really improve those projects? Actually having a point. I know that the main goal there is to make money off it (and it even works for some FFmpeg developers, so it may work here), but in order to achieve that it needs to offer potential users a solution for their problems (again, like FFmpeg started with open-source implementation of decoding and encoding popular formats based on H.261-H.263 and grew up from there into something that most people use to decode or convert their multimedia content). And a pile of code that does everything and nothing at the same time is not it. Actually I encountered one of those project by searching a crate with libxvid bindings (and got only that thing in the search results, which doesn’t support even what my decoder does let alone the stuff I’d rather use libxvid for).

There was a joke about one hardware company (name not given since I forgot it) that its motto was “ready! shoot! aim!”. With modern tools people are so excited that they can shoot a lot, with minimum readying time, that they forgot about aiming entirely. So I’ll wait aside while the rest have fun shooting bystanders and themselves and keep doing what nobody else cares about.

Recently this tweet was brought to my attention (by somebody else who saw it and found hilarious). While I agree with the message (I also find those OMGsecurity people annoying and rather counter-productive), the premise is bullshit, namely those two lines:

Arguably the most brilliant engineer in FFmpeg left because of this. He reverse engineered dozens of codecs by hand as a volunteer.

So I’ll try to explain what’s wrong with that claim and FFmpeg twitter account (or FFaccount for short) in general.
(more…)

For those who infer from the title I’m going to talk about something negative, this is a philosophical term with rather positive definition. Also I guess this post goes against the old Latin principle noli stercus tangere et non olebit but oh well.

I happen to observe FFmpeg (not sure how to call this iteration of it) and it looks like it’s been never greater before, with a further potential to grow:

• there’s a new developer who not only looks like a perfect fit for the project but also seemed to unite other developers;
• the development has achieved new levels and got to the modern standards as can be seen from this patchset;
• even long-standing complaints about inaction against badly behaved developers have been addressed and bans are enacted (since last year even);
• important patchsets are pushed without unnecessary delays (for example, caused by reviews);
• participating in various trade shows with constant success;
• and thanks to STF the core developers can get funding for the crucial (or even critical) work in transparent way; and apparently cryptocurrency is an option too.

The things are going so well that FFmpeg can really afford not to care about every potential contributor (that ship has sailed indeed). More than that, they’ve even got their own soft Jia Tan—a person writing under multiple accounts and who introduced what others considered a glaring security hole (like there’s anything wrong with ffmpeg launching a third-party application on user’s request). All the tell-tale signs of success are there!

I honestly don’t see how the project can get any better (and yes, I feel that I’m not worthy to use it so I don’t).

Apparently there’s some work been done recently on the ProRes encoders in jbmpeg with the intent not merely to fix the bugs but also to leave just one. So why not talk about the format support, it’s about as entertaining as the recent story in the project demonstrating once again that most of the problems in open-source development can’t be solved by throwing donations, even moderately large ones.

So, ProRes, the format with its history being a rather good demonstration about the project issues (CEmpeg and libav back then, and FFmpeg throughout its history in general). This tale is full of whimsy (depending on your sense of humour of course) and contains moral as well.
(more…)

Inspired by recent events.

It is no secret that sometimes (or rather often, I’d say) political and business considerations prevail over technical ones. The persistent rumour said that MP3 format was not so bad originally but during the standardisation phase it had been changed to contain QMF in addition to MDCT because a certain company still help a patent on it. We have a couple of video codec standards developed not for any technical merit but rather for trying to create a patent-free formats (and failing at that). We see how many modern formats (not just audio or video, but streaming protocols as well) are essentially “one of everything” because each company tries to put its own technology there (probably for patent considerations)—and then even more companies appear with a claim to own a patent on the same technology (some of them form a patent pool, some act on their own). And of course we see Nokia (not the dead phone company and not the tyre producing one either) trying to become the SCO of this decade.

You know, the modern patent system was formed with the intent of sustaining development of new inventions: an inventor brings benefit to society with new inventions, society repays by granting that inventor a protection on exclusive rights for those inventions allowing to get profit from them. In theory a mutually beneficial scheme but people always find a way to game system and here we are. IMO the best patch to the legal system would be to strip those abusing their rights of that right, be it copyright (material part), industrial property rights or anything else. But as an optimist I expect the legions of lawyers to find a workaround for it rather fast.

Anyway, I wanted to demonstrate how political and financial interests spoiled already undead (I’ll elaborate below why I think so) project. And how a certain Frenchman paved a road with good intentions there. Of course I’m talking about FFmpeg (or jbmpeg as I name it after the current most influential person).
(more…)