[FFmpeg-devel] Files crashing FFmpeg

Jason Garrett-Glaser darkshikari
Wed Dec 3 13:44:45 CET 2008


On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 4:01 AM, Diego Biurrun <diego at biurrun.de> wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 02, 2008 at 11:39:01PM -0800, Jason Garrett-Glaser wrote:
>> On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 6:09 AM, compn <tempn at twmi.rr.com> wrote:
>> > On Wed, 26 Nov 2008 21:54:29 -0800, Mike Melanson wrote:
>> >>Benjamin Larsson wrote:
>> >>> This list http://tranquillity.ath.cx/ffmpeg_crashfiles.txt contains
>> >>> links to files that crashes a FFmpeg version from 2007. Can anyone come
>> >>> up with a good tool so we can run through and check all these files ?
>> >>>
>> >>> This list was donated by Picsearch.
>> >>
>> >>Do we have the project budget to send them a nice fruit basket for the
>> >>holidays? This is some good stuff. It would be nice if some other
>> >>organizations that automatically process millions of diverse files with
>> >>FFmpeg could throw some problem files our way.
>> >
>> > it would be nice of youtube to send some changes back our way too...
>>
>> From a talk I had with the Google engineer who runs the Youtube
>> encoding chain a few days ago, it seems Google's official policy is
>> that they're not allowed to publicly admit that they use open source
>> products such as ffmpeg (!!).
>
> What is the reason he gave for this nonsensical attitude?  Google uses
> open source all over in other places and employs a multitude of central
> open source devs...

There were a number of excuses he tried to make for this.  (all quotes
aren't actual quotes)

The primary one was that of patents, with regards to x264: "we
shouldn't publicly state we are using x264 because then people might
go after you for patent reasons."  There is some glimpse of reason to
this, as x264 is a rather small project that hasn't gotten takedown
threats just yet.

But then I asked him "well than what about ffmpeg?  Do you seriously
expect that companies would be more likely to go after ffmpeg for
patent infringement because Google uses them?"

And he responded that "competitors to Google [e.g. Microsoft] might
choose to go after ffmpeg to try to 'get at google'".

Yes, the reasoning is complete horseshit, but apparently they're hard
and fast on not making any public statement on using open source
software.  This is of course hilarious irony given Summer of Code and
other such programs Google runs.  By the way, the conversation began
when I asked him about the possibility of giving some credit to ffmpeg
and x264 (perhaps in some About section somewhere on the Youtube
site).

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