Google’s YouTube Uses FFmpeg

I don't want to be snarky in response to an ffmpeg developer, because I love ffmpeg and respect his contributions, but still, this is not exactly news. The explosion of the entire category of "video sharing sites based on Flash" happened right after ffmpeg added FLV support.<p>That was the missing piece -- before that, you could only convert videos to FLV using Adobe's proprietary (and expensive and crappy and GUI-based, not command-line) tools. ffmpeg provided the missing chunk of the pipeline, and a lot of people had the exact same "aha!" moment, and within a short time a bunch of sites like launched (or converted to a Flash video player from a crappy "Click here for WMV, Click here for QT, now wait a good long time" experience).<p>ffmpeg didn't just help YouTube, it helped make the entire category of video-sharing websites go big.

Well... I also use FFmpeg to encode all the video that's presented on th iG (a large Brazilian portal+ISP) channel in Sony and LG internet-enabled TVs. It works really well.<p>If any FFmpeg developer is reading this, thank you for making our product possible. If you ever come to Brazil, the beer is on us.

To me this illustrates that if you want to ensure that improvements to your code are shared back, you'd better use the AGPL license (<a href="http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl.html</a>) instead of GPL.<p>Quote from the AGPL preamble:<p><i>It requires the operator of a network server to provide the source code of the modified version running there to the users of that server. Therefore, public use of a modified version, on a publicly accessible server, gives the public access to the source code of the modified version.</i><p><i>edit</i>: according to a comment below, Google is already sharing their improvements without being obliged to do so. Nice! You can't always count on goodwill though, so my point stands.

What else would it use? (Genuinely curious, what else is viable?)<p>Although I think it uses libvpx for WebM, but who knows, they may have migrated to FFmpeg 0.6.

I was under the impression (though I may be wrong) most standard video types are converted by some in-house closed source software developed by Google, but then if it's an odd/obscure format their software can't process they fall back on FFMPEG. Even if they do use FFMPEG I'd guess it's heavily modified to suit their needs/infastructure

My comment is somewhat off-topic.<p>Google is also using Aspose[1] for their Google Docs' Documents. You can see it's <i>Aspose.Words for Java</i>, if you read the source of the documents you download from Google Docs.<p>I've checked only for RTF and DOC formats though.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.aspose.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.aspose.com/</a>

Anyone else want to see the ffmpeg command lines used for various conversions? I've looked before for them, but had no luck.

VLC is able to playback RoQ as well apparently. It was not able to skip through the video though. Also the film is 27 seconds but VLC displayed it as 1:46.<p>In any case, VLC can handle stuff like RoQ and that is why I love it.