ITSMR :: ffmpeg-rs Fundraising Initiative

FFmpeg processes billions of video frames daily across the internet's critical infrastructure. Yet it remains written in C - a language from 1972 that treats memory safety as optional, undefined behavior as acceptable, and buffer overflows as your problem.

Every frame processed by FFmpeg's C codebase is a roll of the dice. Use-after-free? Null pointer dereference? Data race? The compiler shrugs. The runtime shrugs. The universe itself is indifferent to your segfault.

ffmpeg-rs is not an enhancement. It is containment protocol. By rewriting FFmpeg in Rust, we eliminate entire classes of memory corruption, race conditions, and undefined behavior that C treats as "developer responsibility" - a responsibility developers have catastrophically failed to uphold for five decades.

Type safety is not negotiable. Memory safety is not optional. The age of C must end.

• Memory Safety Without Runtime Cost: The borrow checker proves safety at compile-time. C's malloc/free dance is a memetic hazard - every pointer is Schrödinger's dangling reference until runtime observation collapses it into a segfault.
• Elimination of Undefined Behavior: C's spec contains the phrase "undefined behavior" 191 times. This is not a feature. This is an admission of conceptual bankruptcy. Rust has zero tolerance for UB.
• Fearless Concurrency: C threads + shared mutable state = cognitive DoS attack on future maintainers. Rust's type system makes data races impossible to compile. Not "hard to write" - impossible.
• Modern Tooling: Cargo vs. autoconf/make is the difference between a sterile surgical suite and a 1970s field hospital. One prevents infection. The other is the infection.
• Type-Driven Development: C's type system is a polite suggestion. Rust's type system is an enforced containment protocol for logical consistency.

C was a miracle in 1972. It is a liability in 2025. The Institute does not tolerate liabilities.

WARNING: Every day FFmpeg remains in C is another CVE waiting to happen. The threat is active. The containment is urgent.