On 26/10/2025 16:26, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
Hi Everyone
As requested, reposting this, as a new thread
For context please see:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VkcAvqV24c
https://lists.ffmpeg.org/archives/list/[email protected]/thread/PZL3NMBYJJ7RHEJ2NEGE26R2HHXKRQ2S/
Subject: Twitter/X spat on Youtube
Should the delegation, from where this came from, be revoked to FFmpeg social
media?
(vote ends in 7 days)
Please reply on ffmpeg-devel with your choice:
[R] revoke access
[K] keep access
K
I think Kieran has been doing a good job with our X account.
His approach to spreading awareness about what we do may be
unconventional and confrontational, but its this is how engagement works
on social networks. And I like engagement - it gives our project a name,
rather than simply being brick #23 in xkcd #2347.
I looked at the video, and I failed to understand the author's points -
he said how integration is difficult, and our reply of asking for
patches was rude. Then he went off on a tangent that VLC releases are
too far apart, then went on about how we have responsibilities to listen
to and fix issues that large users of ffmpeg have, and our repeated
response of asking for patches was rude, even though he has donated and
built a company's infra using our code?
We're volunteers, and we're absolved of responsibility of our code. As a
project, we don't have to treat someone as special because they used our
work or donated. Asking for patches is pretty standard - we even have an
error code. By looking into issues and writing, you either fix the
issue, or very quickly gain an appreciation for why the issue has not
been fixed yet, in a way that goes beyond argument.
Integration can be difficult to someone lacking knowledge of our APIs.
We have a very low-level API. It's not something that can be improved
specifically -- it gives API users freedom. From our community, there
are projects that wrap the API to give users far easier time with
decoding, seeking, filtering, and, encoding.
There were plans to integrate a high-level API at some point, but
there's enough of an ecosystem built around our existing API to give
users a far wider choice in terms of abstractions and languages than an
official high-level API.
I do agree our project can be a pain to build and integrate - switching
to meson would solve this as far as my use cases go, as well as many
other projects using our libraries.
Donations are appreciated as they help keep our infra going, as well as
very rare trips and hardware when we agree on them, but we as developers
don't have free access to them, so its difficult for us to gauge their
impact beyond a number.
An effective way of asking us to fix something is to approach us
directly. Incidentally, if someone at Twitch or X is reading this, give
me a call if you'd like to see our AAC encoder improved.
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