A history of the FFmpeg project

[Posted January 25, 2023 by corbet]

Kostya Shishkov has just posted the concluding installment of an extensive history of the FFmpeg project:

See, unlike many people I don’t regard FFmpeg as something unique (in the sense that it’s a project only Fabrice Bellard could create). It was nice to have around and it helped immeasurably but without it something else would fill the niche. There were other people working on similar tasks after all (does anybody remember transcode? or gmerlin?). Hopefully you got an idea on how many talented unsung heroes had been working on FFmpeg and libav over the years.

The full set can be found on this page. (Thanks to Paul Wise).

A history of the FFmpeg project

Posted Jan 26, 2023 8:56 UTC (Thu) by hailfinger (subscriber, #76962) [Link] (2 responses)

I had hoped to read a history of the FFmpeg project, instead it is mostly a list of (paraphrased) "person X did develop Y and damaged the project by doing Z". Quoting directly from the blog series: "[...] made FFmpeg into what it is today: large, successful and toxic mess." Admittedly "person X did develop Y" is an aspect of history, but most of the blog series is missing when something happened, we only get to know that something happened.

A history of the FFmpeg project

Posted Jan 26, 2023 17:53 UTC (Thu) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (1 responses)

Yeah, this all comes across as something written from the side of libav - which started a war that caused collateral damage across the FOSS landscape for years and then lost it both on public perception and meritocracy.

A history of the FFmpeg project

Posted Jan 28, 2023 3:23 UTC (Sat) by PengZheng (subscriber, #108006) [Link]

I'm expecting Michael Niedermayer, the long time leader of FFmpeg, to write an article about the history of FFmpeg, which should be more fun to read.