Kostya's Boring Codec World

For the last few years I feel some disappointment with my work building up and now I try to explain why.

What kept me working on FFmpeg and later Libav?

Money? Well, I admit that it brought me ~$20000 during all those years of work and it was very helpful in my student years but it’s not that much really and wouldn’t be enough for living even in Ukraine.

Of course the main driving reason was fun of writing code and joy of being useful. I still remember being proud for a week for this commit. I still remember how it was fun (sometimes) to reverse engineer a codec and warm feeling when it’s done. I remember users thanking for the work done and asking for features.

Where did all go?

The project matured and now the situation got different. Previously you mostly had millions of clueless users asking how to transcode something to FLV that were tiring but easy to deal with, now you have more enterprise users that use our code often without acknowledging or contributing back (in the old times Picsearch gave us a database of audio and video files in Internet that used codecs we didn’t support — that’s one of the most valuable contributions ever). But that’s not what kills the fun, “security holes” do.

With an advance of automatic fuzz tools it’s easy to generate millions of damaged files that crash your decoder and yet there are no tools for generating correct patches. Fixing those crashes is tedious, requires a lot of thinking (should I disable it? will it affect decoding correct files? etc.) and in other words not fun at all. You have to balance between having decent code, ability to handle corrupted files and being robust — and in order to account for all possible corner cases in the code from the very beginning you should be more paranoid than FFmpeg leader. And somehow you cannot avoid it, you’re expected to fix it or else. This is like you’re on maintenance contract but without any form of compensation, you just get a mountain of corrupt samples and “have you fixed it yet?” every week. Or you get some “security vulnerability” reports with the same effect. I repeat, this is not fun — so why should I do it for free?

There is only one exception around called VideoLAN. Those guys really show (and not only show) some care and they give back to us. Just in my case I gave them all they wanted and I could give them.

As for the rest, world domination is not my goal, I don’t see fun in maintenance and noone is paying me to do it. Why should I continue?

So I’ll try to finish whatever projects I still have around and end it all. I’ve been around for 9.5 years after all, that’s long enough.

P.S. Maybe I should move to Oljonsbyn.

Sweden is awesome country and its food is plain but decent and heart-warming. And everything gets even better in late December.

There’s no Christmas in Sweden, they have Jul — it’s less Christian in nature but significantly better. As an Ukrainian I totally approve Swedish version because the national Ukrainian animal and products from it are well celebrated.

Yes, that one

Sweden has really good dairy products (I’d especially recommend cheeses and filmjölk), surprisingly good selection of meat (including horse, deer, reindeer and elk), outstanding herring (really, nothing beats fried fresh strömming) and other fish products. And oh so many variations of candies everywhere. And drinks.

Berries

In jul it all gets even better since special food appears — traditional julskinka, sylta (and especially julpressylta), marzipan pigs, special versions of prästost and other cheese… And of course julmust.

One can try traditional game of mine — try different variations of everything. For example, drinks (Trocadero, julmust/påskmust or filmjölk), cheese or even köttbullar (I’ve finally found köttbullar made from deer meat for example). Or at least look at designs of marzipan pigs, every konditori makes their own.

Fun fact — in Gävle they like unofficial symbol of the city so much that they have marzipan goats along with pigs.

And another fun fact — there is a drink from Norrland called Portello and it has unlicensed clones. The real Portello is produced by The Norrland Brewery (aka Vasa Bryggeri) but some other breweries have drinks with similar taste but different name. Guttsta Källa produces Ortello and Mora Bryggeri produces Candelo, though it’s a trollish brewery that makes Rio Cola with familiar Cuba Cola design, too lazy to produce Julmust and Påskmust (see picture) and less popular drinks like Guldus or Haiwa are all renamed too.

Mora Bryggeri — no julmust or påskmust

The Reference Drinks

I’ll continue exploring the wonderful world of Swedish food at every possible occasion.

And some fun things to try:

• julmust with semlor (they are always available in Norrland, it seems);
• fried gravad lax;
• filmjölk with berries (I mix lingon, blueberries and raspberries — they are available frozen all year round);
• julskinka and Wastgöta Kloster cheese on tunnbröd;
• Swedish apples;
• chewing candies;
• and of course Trocadero from any brewery in Norrland!

I still don’t have Internet connection at home (for two months and counting) and not sure if I get any this year.

So here’s the list of rants I’d have written, had I had access:

• SD cards as modern floppies — similarly ubiquitous and slow;
• Swiss cheeses — some are OK, most are slightly sticky, coated in something very smelly and named “chas”;
• WMV9 pre-RTM P-frames decoding: how it should be decoded and why our decoder is still wrong sometimes;
• Bink2 decoder progress report (since I’ve not started working on it yet).

Do not stay tuned.

When I visited VDD13 (they’ve finally made it right — with Trocadero and surströmming, hopefully they’ll keep the level in the future) I could make some additional observations on the rail that finally lead to this post.

First, I like to talk about catenary constructions. They usually come in two variations — a single post with a special support for the wires or two posts with a horizontal construction between them that supports the wires.
It might be hard to believe but they can be æsthetically appealing too.

The top on my list is Sweden (and Netherlands since they seem to employ the same construction). The poles are made from lattice and thus are nice and horizontal supporting constructions are always made as trapezoids.

Runner-up is Switzerland — they also have nice lattice constructions but they seem a bit compressed to me.

Germany has the same poles but for wider ranges they usually have only a wire between poles from which the wire-supporting constructions hang.

Most of the other contries have simple round masts or H-shaped beams that are not interesting, though I must admit French ones have nice wire support constructions reminding of violin bow.

And on the very bottom of the list is Denmark with its large ugly ?-shaped masts in the colour of rust.

And now to the second thing — toilets. I usually try to avoid them but sometimes I feel I have to visit one onboard. So here’s a comparison of that essential thing.

Ukraine — toilets on so-called “InterCity+” should not be that bad, toilets in older carriages are better not be visited at all (and since they dump contents onto tracks directly, toilet rooms are locked long before stations and after them).

Germany — on InterCity trains toilets are decent (or at least tolerable), on ICE they are too small even in the first class. Even on regional trains and trams it seems to be bigger.

France — on TGV first class they are even smaller that on ICE, in the second class even a person smaller than me has problems fitting inside.

Sweden — those people really care. The spaciest toilet rooms on trains I can remember (especially on Reginatåg).

Switzerland — the toilet on Rhätische Bahn regional trains seemed quite good even if those are narrow-gauge trains.

Moral of the story — Swedish trains and railways are the best (and if you have doubts you’re reading the wrong blog).

Of course this interests nobody but I wanted to rant about it for a long time.

General principles:

1. Compact size — I like to be able to fit all of my computers on the desk, any size comparable with power supply unit size would do. Laptops are fine too.
2. Silent — no damned fans.
3. An ability to use normal storage, not 16MB SSB soldered onboard.
4. No x86 CPU.
5. If it’s a laptop it should be able to work for 10 hours with battery.

Display:

1. 4:3 aspect ratio. If displays nowadays are made for movie-watchers then it’s a sad world. Too much of vertical space is eaten by various toolbars, menu bars and such.
2. sane resolution. Again, 1920×1080 may be ideal for movie-watchers but I prefer it to be either VGA-based (i.e. multiple of 640×480 or 800×600) or power of two based. And whoever thought about 1366×768 should burn in hell!

Performance — if Libav compiles in ten minutes on dual core system then it’s fast enough for me.

ARM-based laptops are almost good for that, especially performance wise. There’s just one big “but” — they are almost all are for Android or chromebooks. And Baidu has never intended those systems for any real usage. Playing games — fine, browsing — passable (though Firefox 3 on my old PowerPC MacMini with 512 MB RAM gives much better experience than Chrome on tablet with 1GB RAM), editing texts (code) — absolute fail. I can live without a numpad on keyboard (it’s a legacy for accountants and their calculators after all) but not having even “delete” key (there’s only backspace) is pathetic.

So I live with a faint hope that there will be a computer good enough for me.

I think this should be in every first aid kit.

Probably Sweden was never a really influental in science besides chemistry but it has contributed a lot of small things that really made our world better: high-precision measuring tools, or official human rights representative, or Trocadero, even flatpacked furniture.

Here’s an example: in the swedishest corner of Sweden there was a guy who really changed our world with two simple things. One of them is centrifugal milk separator. Another one is the nozzle. Yes, a simple nozzle that is used in rocket and jet engines. Were those inventions that great and important? Maybe not. Were they useful and have they changed the world a bit to the better? Definitely yes.

And that’s how the place where he came from looks nowadays:

(in case it was not obvious — I’ve been to Orsa and I’m proud about that).