[FFmpeg-devel] Project orientation

[Nicolas George]

James Almer (12020-07-04):
> Just a few quick Saturday morning thoughts that don't cover your entire
> email and may be just me rambling, but some of this could be linked to
> the completely different world we're living in today than in say 2010,
> regarding what is expected of multimedia projects. Nowadays almost
> everything is streaming, and almost everything is mobile focused.
> Getting a 1% speed up in one hot loop in h264dec that could mean the
> difference between realtime or dropped frames in some ARM chip is
> immensely more important and demanded than a smoother experience running
> a filter chain, or a decoder for a 20 years old console game that would
> aid with emulation efforts. And yes, even if those chips have a hw decoder.
> 
> Similarly, the HEVC patent pool disaster completely ruined any chance
> for ffhevc to ever see any kind of real development, and the situation
> indirectly (or not) resulted in what would have been the internal AV1
> decoder becoming a standalone library: It required a extremely
> permissive license for the sake of fast and widespread adoption that
> ffmpeg could not provide with LGPL.
> It's the first time a very important codec is not present internally in
> our codebase, and that itself is proof things are definitely not the
> same as they used to. I can't imagine ffmpeg without an internal h264
> decoder ever making it anywhere a decade ago.
> Of course anyone could port it today, but does anyone capable want to?
> So far it doesn't look like.

Thanks for these explanations. There are a few facts that I was not
aware of that explain the situation better.

> Another thing worth mentioning is a lack of new blood. Despite
> participating in GSoC for a long while, i can't name a student that
> stuck around after the fact. Mind, there are new devs that started
> contributing for other reasons, but perhaps not enough?

When the something-of-code season is upon us, I have noticed we have to
rack our brains to find projects that are easy enough for students, and
it is hard.

Maybe FFmpeg has become too advanced to be able to benefit much of
contributions from the above-average students that make the bulk of the
something-of-code initiatives.

Maybe we should consider proposing projects and tasks that are much
harder, and accepting that we may get nobody for them, but if we get
somebody they could be somebody exceptional who may stay in the long
run.

Just a few thoughts about it, probably betraying shameless elitism from
my part.

Regards,

-- 
  Nicolas George
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