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• Google’s YouTube Uses FFmpeg

  9 février 2011, par Multimedia Mike — General

  Controversy arose last week when Google accused Microsoft of stealing search engine results for their Bing search engine. It was a pretty novel sting operation and Google did a good job of visually illustrating their side of the story on their official blog.

  This reminds me of the fact that Google’s YouTube video hosting site uses FFmpeg for converting videos. Not that this is in the same league as the search engine shenanigans (it’s perfectly legit to use FFmpeg in this capacity, but to my knowledge, Google/YouTube has never confirmed FFmpeg usage), but I thought I would revisit this item and illustrate it with screenshots. This is not new information— I first empirically tested this fact 4 years ago. However, a lot of people wonder how exactly I can identify FFmpeg on the backend when I claim that I’ve written code that helps power YouTube.

  Short Answer
  How do I know YouTube uses FFmpeg to convert multimedia ? Because :

  1. FFmpeg can decode a number of impossibly obscure multimedia formats using code I wrote
  2. YouTube can transcode many of the same formats
  3. I screwed up when I wrote the code to support some of these weird formats
  4. My mistakes are still present when YouTube transcodes certain fringe formats

  Longer Answer (With Pictures !)
  Let’s take a video format named RoQ, developed by noted game designer Graeme Devine. Originated for use in the FMV-heavy game The 11th Hour, the format eventually found its way into the Quake 3 engine as well as many games derived from the same technology.

  Dr. Tim Ferguson reverse engineered the format (though it would later be open sourced along with the rest of the Q3 engine). I wrote a RoQ playback system for FFmpeg, and I messed up in doing so. I believe my coding error helps demonstrate the case I’m trying to make here.

  Observe what happened when I pushed the jk02.roq sample through YouTube in my original experiment 4 years ago :

  
  
  

  Do you see how the canyon walls bleed into the sky ? That’s not supposed to happen. FFmpeg doesn’t do that anymore but I was able to go back into the source code history to find when it did do that :

  
  
  

  Academic Answer
  FFmpeg fixed this bug in June of 2007 (thanks to Eric Lasota). The problem had to do with premature colorspace conversion in my original decoder.

  Leftovers
  I tried uploading the video again to see if the problem persists in YouTube’s transcoder. First bit of trivia : YouTube detects when you have uploaded the same video twice and rejects the subsequent attempts. So I created a double concatenation of the video and uploaded it. The problem is gone, illustrating that the backend is actually using a newer version of FFmpeg. This surprises me for somewhat esoteric reasons.

  Here’s another interesting bit of trivia for those who don’t do a lot of YouTube uploading— YouTube reports format details when you upload a video :

  
  
  

  So, yep, RoQ format. And you can wager that this will prompt me to go back through the litany of unusual formats that FFmpeg supports to see how YouTube responds.

• Curator of the Samples Archive

  13 mai 2011, par Multimedia Mike — General

  Remember how I mirrored the world-famous MPlayerHQ samples archive a few months ago ? Due to a series of events, the original archive is no longer online. However, me and the people who control the mplayerhq.hu domain figured out how to make samples.mplayerhq.hu point to samples.multimedia.cx.

  That means... I’m the current owner and curator of our central multimedia samples repository. Such power ! This should probably be the fulfillment of a decade-long dream for me, having managed swaths of the archive, most notably the game formats section.

  How This Came To Be

  If you pay any attention to the open source multimedia scene, you might have noticed that there has been a smidge of turmoil. Heated words were exchanged, authority was questioned, some people probably said some things they didn’t mean, and the upshot is that, where once there was one project (FFmpeg), there are now 2 projects (also Libav). And to everyone who has wanted me to mention it on my blog— there, I finally broke my silence and formally acknowledged the schism.

  For my part, I was just determined to ensure that the samples archive remained online, preferably at the original samples.mplayerhq.hu address. There are 10 years worth of web links out there pointing into the original repository.

  Better Solution

  I concede that it’s not entirely optimal to host the repository here at multimedia.cx. While I can offer a crazy amount of monthly bandwidth, I can’t offer rsync (invaluable for keeping mirrors in sync), nor can the server provide anonymous FTP or allow me to offer accounts to other admins who can manage the repository.

  The samples archive is also mirrored at samples.libav.org/samples. I understand that service is provided by VideoLAN. Right now, both repositories are known to be static. I’m open to brainstorms about how to improve the situation.

• Thread count option in FFmpeg for FASTEST conversion to h264 ?

  5 septembre 2013, par Saptarshi Biswas

  I need to maximize speed while converting videos using FFmpeg to h264

  • Any input format of source videos
  • User's machine can have any number of cores
  • Power and memory consumption are non-issues

  Of course, there are a whole bunch of options that can be tweaked but this question is particularly about choosing the best -thread <count></count> option. I am trying to find an ideal thread count as a function of

  • no. of cores
  • input video format
  • h264-friendly values maybe ?
  • anything else missed above ?

  I am aware the default -thread 0 follows one-thread-per-core approach which is supposed to be optimal. But I am not sure if this is time or space-optimized. Also, on certain testcases, I've seen more threads (say 4 threads on my dual core test machine) finishes quicker than the default.

  Any other direction, say configure options w.r.t. threads, worth pursuing ?