What is FFmpeg?

The core maintainer communities for VLC and FFmpeg are tiny: 5 people for VLC, 10-15 for FFmpeg.

“The core community of VLC is five people. The core community of FFmpeg is ten to fifteen, and we are the ones who are going to maintain your code.”

Google AI-generated security reports on FFmpeg before fixes were ready, burdening unpaid volunteers while Google publicized its AI's performance to the press.

“Recently what changed was Google started using AI to create security reports on an open source project, FFmpeg. Volunteers had to deal with that. They did, they provided very limited funding, and they even went to the media first announcing how good their AI was before the issues could be fixed.”

VLC WebAssembly: VLC and FFmpeg are now being compiled to WebAssembly to run entirely inside a browser's JS VM, reversing the prior model of embedding a browser inside VLC.

“Today we have the opposite, where we have VLC WebAssembly, where we compile all VLC and FFmpeg to decode, to run VLC in inside the JavaScript virtual machine with WebAssembly.”

Only 1% of open source contributors to projects like FFmpeg and VLC stay long-term.

“One percent chance that someone comes and stays. One percent.”

FFmpeg is running on an estimated 100 million to 1 billion CPUs simultaneously at any given moment.

“As we speak easily 100 mil- order of magnitude 100 million, maybe even a billion CPUs as we speak.”

Teenagers have written more assembly code in FFmpeg than Google engineers.

“Teenagers have written more assembly in FFmpeg than Google engineers.”

Over 80% of video-processing pipelines using FFmpeg are dependent on at least one VideoLAN project.

“I would put a finger in the air and say 80-plus percent of those pipelines are dependent on a VideoLAN project.”