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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.

• suitable video encoding for browsers

  26 juin 2022, par seriously

  I was researching how illegal movie streaming services handle all the traffic they get and to understand that I had to follow the steps they perform to get the video data to the users. I got to the stage of video transmission and noticed something that boggled me. Most of the illegal movie streaming sites get their movies/tv-shows through piracy/torrents and even most of the streamers are sister companies of the piracy websites. Now when I took a look at the video encodings of the torrent movies and shows they are h.265 but h.265 is not supported by popular browsers like chrome, firefox edge... Does this mean they (the streamers) have to re-encode every h.265 videos to avc/h.264 before they stream it ? If that's the case, that takes them a huge amount of time to convert their whole movie catalog to h.264 not to mention the space they require to save them. Am I taking a look at this the right way ? Do they really convert and store 2, 3 ... differently encoded video files and stream the suitable one ? Or can they somehow convert the chunks of data they are streaming to h.264 live simultaneously without having to store the h.264 formats hence saving conversion time and space ?

  


• How to properly abort av_seek_frame on FFmpeg ?

  5 mars 2021, par SuRGeoNix

  Normally, you wouldn't care aborting av_seek_frame as it would be really fast on a local file. However, in my case I use a custom AVIOContext for torrent streaming with custom read/seek functions and I'm not able to abort a single seek request !

  


  I've already tried interrupt callbacks (they will not be called at all), some timeouts (rw_timeout/timeout etc.) but by checking FFmpeg's code didn't find anything at all. My last chance was to try to return on read/seek functions an error (I've tried AVERROR_EXIT) which causes even more problems (memory leaks).

  


  The main issue is with Matroska formats that they need to resync (level-1) and they are trying to scan the whole file.

  


  Unfortunately, I'm using C# .NET with FFmpeg.Autogen bindings which means that I don't have low-level access to play around. My workaround is to re-open the whole format context in case on seek abort (to ensure that the player will continues to play at least)

  


  Hope you have a tip for me !

  


  (By the way for some http/hls web formats interrupt callbacks are supported)