Programming

17528 readers

245 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

1064

Microsoft opens a "high priority" bug ticket in ffmpeg, attempting to leech the free labour of the maintainers (trac.ffmpeg.org)

submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

227 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Microsoft employee:

Hi, This is a high priority ticket and the FFmpeg version is currently used in a highly visible product in Microsoft. We have customers experience issues with Caption during Teams Live Event. Please help

Maintainer's comment on twitter:

After politely requesting a support contract from Microsoft for long term maintenance, they offered a one-time payment of a few thousand dollars instead.

This is unacceptable.

And further:

The lesson from the xz fiasco is that investments in maintenance and sustainability are unsexy and probably won't get a middle manager their promotion but pay off a thousandfold over many years.

But try selling that to a bean counter

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 113 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Hilariously the issue was just a setting change in the update, that you can easily change via a command option. They saw thing didn't work, and didn't read the change log at all before asking to pay a one time fee to guarantee it be maintained for them.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 7 months ago (1 children)

So ffmpeg gets a few thousand dollars for such a simple answer/solution? Sounds good to me?

[–] [email protected] 75 points 7 months ago

The problem is that Microsoft wants to pay that for a permanent "never maintain in a way that breaks caption decoding in any default behaviour we use" with that one time payment.

Its a quick fix on Microsofts end to change a quick flag in ffmpeg. It's also quick on their end to maintain a fork that only changes the default. One time payments for maintenance make open source projects like ffmpeg subject to fail.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago

Yes, they should have read the update notes. But I don't see much in the way of documentation regarding the data_field cli option in their documentation even now.