Discussion

qalmakka: 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

theultdev: 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.

righthand: Yeah we’re in React SPA hell instead. I’d rather be in MVC hell.

ianhawes: > 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.

comrade1234: Germany's sovereign tech fund has donated more to FFmpeg thanks meta.

petcat: Do we know how much Meta donated to ffmpeg? A quick search shows that the German STF donated €157,580.00 for 2024/2025.

acedTrex: I mean, they contributed their fixes upstream. Thats the most important thing they could do here.

hparadiz: > As our internal fork became increasingly outdatedOof. 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 :)

randall: sweet.I've been out of the game for a bit but it's great to hear.

BorisMelnik: Meta this is just SAD, Mark your company would be nothing without FF. Do the right thing and write a check today.

randall: 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.

Suckseh: You make a lot of money, Meta makes A LOT of money.doesn't matter how you worship ffmpeg if a company, which makes billions by destroying our society, gives a little bit of handout back.So good for you? Bad for ffmpeg, society and the rest of the world.

dewey: > 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.

EdNutting: Yes, they contributed to open source - this is a good thing.But personally, I took issue with the tone of the blog post, characterised by this opening framing:>For many years we had to rely on our own internally developed fork of FFmpeg to provide features that have only recently been added to FFmpegCould they not have upstreamed those features in the first place? They didn't integrate with upstream and now they're trying to spin this whole thing as a positive? It doesn't seem to acknowledge that they could've done better (e.g. the mantra of 'upstream early; upstream often').The attempt to spin it ("bringing benefits to Meta, the wider industry, and people who use our products") just felt tone-deaf. The people reading this post are engineers - I don't like it when marketing fluff gets shoe-horned into a technical blog post, especially when it's trying to put lipstick on a story that is a mix of good and not so good things.So yeah, you're right, they've contributed to OSS, which is good. But the communication of that contribution could have been different.

dewey: > Could they not have upstreamed those features in the first place?Hard to say without being there, but in my experience it's very easy to end up in "we'll just patch this thing quickly for this use case" to applying a bunch of hacks in various places and then ending up with an out of sync fork. As a developer I've been there many times.It's a big step to go from patching one specific company internal use case to contributing a feature that works for every user of ffmpeg and will be accepted upstream.

kevincox: I find it hard to be too upset, better late than never. Would it have been better to upstream shortly after they wrote the code? Yes. Would it have been better if they also made a sizable contribution to fmmpeg? Yes. But at the end of the day they did contribute back valuable code and that is worth celebrating even if it was done purely because of the benefit to them. Let's hope that this is a small step and they do even more in the future.

kevincox: > By running all encoder instances in parallel, better parallelism can be obtained overall.This makes a lot of sense for the live-streaming use case, and some sense for just generally transcoding a video into multiple formats. But I would love to see time-axis parallelization in ffmpeg. Basically quickly split the input video into keyframe chunks then encode each keyframe in parallel. This would allow excellent parallelization even when only producing a single output. (And without lowering video quality as most intra-frame parallelization does)

EdNutting: As I said, the contribution is good, it's the communication via this blog post that I don't entirely like. It could have been different. It could have acknowledged better ways of engaging with ffmpeg (that would've benefitted both Meta and ffmpeg/the community, not _just_ ffmpeg).But corporate blog posts often go this way. I'm not mad at them or anything. Just a mild dislike ;)

kevincox: Yeah, I see what you mean. It basically shows that they contributed to ffmpeg purely because it helped them, but then they wrote this post to get good will for a contribution that they needed to do for their own self-interest.

vmaurin: A gentle reminder that all the big techs companies would not exist without open source projects

cedws: I think they would due to massive financial incentive. On the other hand, a lot more developers might actually be getting compensated for their work, instead of putting their code on the internet for free and then complaining on social media that they feel exploited.

touwer: Happily for the ffmpeg machines, it's all lightweight content. Something more heavy would overload them

sergiotapia: One thing people can't fault Meta for is that they contribute back to the community at large.We're using React Native, hello!?We're using React!Tons of projects, we should be very grateful they give so much tbh.

xienze: > Could they not have upstreamed those features in the first place?This can be harder than you think. Some time ago I worked a $BIGCORP and internally we used an open source library with some modifications to allow it to fit better into our architecture. In order to get things upstreamed we had to become official contributors AND lobby to get everyone involved to see the usefulness of what we were trying to do. This took a lot of back-and-forth and rethinking the design to make it less specific to OUR needs and more generally applicable to everyone. It's a process. I'm not surprised that Facebook's initial approach would be an internal fork instead of trying to play the political games necessary to get everything upstreamed right off the bat. That's exactly the situation we were in, so I get it.