FFmpeg at Meta: Media Processing at Scale
engineering.fb.com> As our internal fork became increasingly outdated, we collaborated with FFmpeg developers, FFlabs, and VideoLAN to develop features in FFmpeg that allowed us to fully deprecate our internal fork and rely exclusively on the upstream version for our use cases.
Some comments seem to glance over the fact that they did give back and they are not the only ones benefitting from this. Could they give more? Sure, but this is exactly one of the benefits of open source where everyone benefits from changes that were upstreamed or financially supported by an entity instead of re-implementing it internally.
A gentle reminder that all the big techs companies would not exist without open source projects
> At the same time, new versions of FFmpeg brought support for new codecs and file formats, and reliability improvements, all of which allowed us to ingest more diverse video content from users without disruptions.
While it is good they worked to get their internal improvements into upstream, and this is certainly better behavior than some other unmentioned tech giants. It makes one wonder (since they are presumably running it tens of billions of times per day), if they were involved in supporting these improvements all along. If not, why not?
Germany's sovereign tech fund has donated more to FFmpeg thanks meta.
"while the funding mentioned in the [Meta] post is appreciated, it's not enough to sustain the project" https://x.com/FFmpeg/status/2029053011314786701
It wouldn't really be a good fundraising move to tell everyone that Meta took care of everything this fundraising year.
Do we know how much Meta donated to ffmpeg? A quick search shows that the German STF donated €157,580.00 for 2024/2025.
> As our internal fork became increasingly outdated
Oof. That is so relatable.
Also ffmpeg 8 is finally handling HDR and SDR color mapping for HDR perfectly as of my last recompile on Gentoo :)
sweet.
I've been out of the game for a bit but it's great to hear.
Oh this is so nice, I had huge annoyances with figuring out how to automatically copy over the metadata in the past.
Where's the big donation?
they'll get one when the openbsd maintainers become millionaires
Isn't this like telling the world you ate a full meal by eating samples at Costco? Meta is ranking in billions as we speak, they ensure the FOSS projects they rely on are properly funded instead of shovelling cash to bullshit datacentre developments. Otherwise we're basically guaranteed to end up with another XZ fiasco once again when some tired unpaid FOSS maintainer ends up trusting a random Jia Tan in their desperation
This post is all about how they upstreamed their improvements!
If you get mad when a company makes good use of open source and contributes to a project’s betterment, you do not understand the point of open source, you’re just fumbling for a pitchfork.
>Isn't this like telling the world you ate a full meal by eating samples at Costco?
The analogy fails because free samples cost costco (or whatever the vendor is) money. Raking Meta over the coals for using ffmpeg instead of paying for some proprietary makes as much sense as raking every tech company over the coals for using Linux. Or maybe you'd do that too, I can't tell.
I mean, they contributed their fixes upstream. Thats the most important thing they could do here.
Meta is the sole reason PHP is still alive. Also a big reason we're not in MVC hell.
They bet on open source and they open source a lot of technology.
It's one of the best companies when it comes to open source.
I don't know how much total they donate, but I've seen tons of grants given to projects from them.
I think that WordPress is still big enough to keep PHP alive. Furthermore, the sheer number of developer that started coding web apps with PHP in year 2000 plus minus 5 years is large enough to give PHP a critical mass for the next 20 years.
Is Automattic contributing back to PHP? I think that WordPress benefits because PHP is available, but does not significantly contribute to PHP development.
WordPress is keeping PHP alive now
But PHP wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for Meta and it's support.
> Meta is the sole reason PHP is still alive.
This could not be more wrong. Meta is still using PHP AFAIK but I'm not sure it's modern. They created the Hack programming language ~10 years ago but it doesn't look like it's been updated in several years. Most of the improvements they touted were included in PHP 7 years ago.
I never said they were still using it (they are in some cases)
But when the backend world was either Java or ASP, FB chose PHP and helped us other small companies out.
They eventually went Hack, the rest went Node for the most part.
But during those PHP years they gave us HHVM and many PHP improvements to get us through.
Yeah we’re in React SPA hell instead. I’d rather be in MVC hell.
That's a common take here but I'd take React any day.
Been doing this for 20 years. React/JSX is the easiest (for me)
Yeah, same. Not sure if everyone is as traumatized as us when it comes to dealing with 100K LOC large Backbone.js codebases though, or before that where we kept state in the DOM itself and tried to wrangle it all with jQuery.
React and JSX really did help a lot compared to how it used to be, which was pretty unmanageable already.
Wish they gave FFmpeg a decent chunk of money, words are cheap
Same HN post from 6 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47224355
Meta this is just SAD, Mark your company would be nothing without FF. Do the right thing and write a check today.
This is the least informed take i've ever seen.
I worked at fb, and I'm 100% certain we sponsored VLC and OBS at the time. It would be strange if we didn't sponsor FFMPEG, but regardless (as the article says) we definitely got out of our internal fork and upstreamed a lot of the changes.
I worked on live, and everyone in the entire org worships ffmpeg.