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• doc/ffmpeg : restore location of stray passage

  23 janvier 2021, par Gyan Doshi

  doc/ffmpeg : restore location of stray passage
  Added in 88fc1438c69, this passage was separated from its original
  
  context over the years with unrelated entries sandwiched in between.
  

  • [DH] doc/ffmpeg.texi

• Started Programming Young

  6 septembre 2011, par Multimedia Mike — Programming

  I have some of the strangest memories of my struggles to jump into computer programming.

  Back To BASIC
  I remember doing some Logo programming on Apple II computers at school in 5th grade (1987 timeframe). But that was mostly driving turtle graphics. Then I remember doing some TRS-80 BASIC in 7th grade, circa 1989. Emboldened by what very little I had learned in perhaps the week or 2 we took in a science class to do this, I tried a little GW-BASIC on my family’s “IBM-PC compatible” computer (they were still called that back then). I still remember what my first program consisted of. Even back then I was interested in manipulating graphics and color on a computer screen. Thus :

  10 color 1
  20 print "This is color 1"
  30 color 2
  40 print "This is color 2"
  ...
  

  And so on through 15 colors. Hey, it did the job– it demonstrated the 15 different colors you could set in text mode.

  What’s FOR For ?
  That 7th grade computer unit in science class wasn’t very thick on computer science details. I recall working with a lab partner to transcribe code listings into a computer (and also saving my work to a storage cassette). We also developed form processing programs that would print instructions to input text followed by an “INPUT I$” statement to obtain the user’s output.

  I remember there was some situation where we needed a brief delay between input and printing. The teacher told us to use a construct of the form :

  10 FOR I = 1 TO 20000
  20 NEXT I
  

  We had to calibrate the number based on our empirical assessment of how long it lasted but I recall that the number couldn’t be much higher than about 32000, for reasons that would become clearer much later.

  Imagine my confusion when I would read and try to comprehend BASIC program code I would find in magazines. I would of course see that FOR..NEXT construct all over the place but obviously not in the context of introducing deliberate execution delays. Indeed, my understanding of one of the fundamental building blocks of computer programming — iteration — was completely skewed because of this early lesson.

  Refactoring
  Somewhere along the line, I figured out that the FOR..NEXT could be used to do the same thing a bunch of times, possibly with different values. A few years after I had written that color program, I found it again and realized that I could write it as :

  10 for I = 1 to 15
  20 color I
  30 print I
  40 next I
  

  It still took me a few more years to sort out the meaning of WHILE..WEND, though.

• Internecine Legal Threats

  1er juin 2011, par Multimedia Mike — Legal/Ethical

  FFmpeg and associated open source multimedia projects such as xine, MPlayer, and VLC have long had a rebel mystique about them ; a bunch of hackers playing fast and loose with IP law in order to give the world the free multimedia experience it deserved. We figured out the algorithms using any tools available, including the feared technique of binary reverse engineering. When I gave a presentation about FFmpeg at Linuxtag in 2007, I created this image illustrating said mystique :

  
  
  

  It garnered laughs. But I made the point that we multimedia hackers just press on, doing our thing while ignoring legal threats. The policy has historically worked out famously for us– to date, I seem to be the only person on the receiving end of a sort-of legal threat from the outside world.

  Who would have thought that the most credible legal threat to an open source multimedia project would emanate from a fork of that very project ? Because that’s exactly what has transpired :

  
  
  Click for full threat
  

  So it came to pass that Michael Niedermayer — the leader of the FFmpeg project — received a bona fide legal nastygram from Mans Rullgard, a representative of the FFmpeg-forked Libav project. The subject of dispute is a scorched-earth matter involving the somewhat iconic FFmpeg zigzag logo :

  Original 2D logo		enhanced 3D logo

  To think of all those years we spent worrying about legal threats from organizations outside the community. I’m reminded of that time-honored horror trope/urban legend staple : Get out ! The legal threats are coming from inside the house !

  I’m interested to see how this all plays out, particularly regarding jurisdiction, as we have a U.K. resident engaging an Italian lawyer outfit to deliver a legal threat to an Austrian citizen regarding an image hosted on a server in Hungary. I suspect I know why that law firm was chosen, but it’s still a curious jurisdictional setup.

  People often used to ask me if we multimedia hackers would get sued to death for doing what we do. My response was always, “There’s only one way to know for sure,” by which I meant that we would just have to engage in said shady activities and determine empirically if lawsuits resulted. So I’m a strong advocate for experimentation to push the limits. Kudos to Michael and Mans for volunteering to push the legal limits.