There has never been an official explanation for FFmpeg name but people agree it has something to do with being fast (Stefano Sabatini had an output of some program trying to decipher this acronym in his mail signatures but it was just a joke). So we need to mention the people who made FFmpeg really fast by providing various optimisations.
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FFhistory: optimisations
January 13th, 2023FFhistory: Måns Rullgård
January 12th, 2023Finally I can pay homage to a man whose contributions to the project are rivalling Fabrice’s and Michael’s. Of course I’m talking about Måns.
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FFhistory: audio
January 11th, 2023Today I’d like to talk about people responsible for the specific audio components. For example, FFmpeg had AC-3 encoder right from the start but the decoding had to be done via third-party GPLed library so somebody had to write a native decoder. Or who is responsible for the majority of speech codecs support in libavcodec? And who has made a terrible audio encoder that was still in use by a major video hosting (not me)? Read on to find out.
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FFhistory: divas and rock stars
January 10th, 2023Any sufficiently large project (not necessarily a software one) will eventually get one or more persons of significant talents and even more significant personality. Initially they’ll bring good work to the project but eventually they’ll feel they don’t get enough credit for it and then scandals start. This is usually called diva or rock star behaviour since the effect was most commonly (and easily) observed with these categories of people. FFmpeg though its history also had some people deserving the title: Ronald Bultje, Baptiste Coudurier and (to a lesser degree) Kieran Kunhya. Paul B. Mahol seems to try to get into the company or maybe he’s bored so today we’ll review just the first three guys.
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FFhistory: early reverse engineers
January 9th, 2023What attracted me to FFmpeg as well as e.g. video hosting providers was its ability to decode various formats that were often tricky to decode even on their native platforms let alone in other circumstances (for instance, I remember the official Indeo 5 decoder freezing Windows system when trying to play perfectly valid Indeo 5 videos encoded with a beta Indeo 5 encoder). So let’s remember the names of those who made the project truly versatile.
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FFhistory: zeal and passion
January 7th, 2023Before moving to people who have contributed greatly to the functionality of the project let’s talk about the two people who have made an extremely large impact on the perceived image of FFmpeg. Of course I’m talking about Diego Biurrun (the passionate one) and Carl Eugen Hoyos (the zealot).
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FFhistory: early contributors
January 5th, 2023There are still many prominent people worth separate posts but for now I’d like to give a shout-out to the various developers (mostly coming from MPlayer) who worked on FFmpeg before 2006. Why 2006? This was a time when the project started participating in Summer of Code program that drew some students in. Plus 2005-2006 was the time when a lot of video hosting sites were found (a couple of them even surviving to this day) and you can guess what technology they started to use…
So here’s the list and remember: if somebody is not listed here that means he is likely to appear in some other post. I’ll try to add some description of the work but in many cases if I have nothing to say assume it’s “provided bugfixes, tried to improve things and so on”.
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FFhistory: Michael Niedermayer
January 3rd, 2023And 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.
FFhistory: hosting and admins
January 1st, 2023As 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
libavtimes); - Dr. Attila Kinali;
- Michael Niedermayer (has to do it since the times
FFmpegwent 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
January 1st, 2023Ukraine 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!