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A small freedom area RSS

Personal blog · blog.pkh.meprogramminggamesmath

A small freedom area RSS is a personal blog at blog.pkh.me about programming, games and math. Since 2012, 39 different Hacker News readers have linked it 84 times, most often “The FFmpeg/Libav situation”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-04, and you can follow it by feed.

Visit the blog
84mentions?
39HN people?
2012–2026first – last linked?
Links on Hacker News per year · peak 21 in 2025

Most-linked posts?

  1. The FFmpeg/Libav situation
    17 people · 18 mentions · first linked 2012-06-30
  2. Text rendering and effects using GPU-computed distances
    4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-11-01
  3. The FFmpeg/Libav situation (2012)
    3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-07-09
  4. Figuring out round, floor and ceil with integer division
    3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-11-25
  5. Perfecting anti-aliasing on signed distance functions
    3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-07-26
  6. High quality GIF with FFmpeg
    3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-03-16
  7. The current technology is not ready for proper blending
    3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-07-18
  8. A series of tricks and techniques I learned doing tiny GLSL demos
    2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-12-07
  9. The most useful math formulas
    2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-06-09
  10. Improving Color Quantization Heuristics
    2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-12-31

What Hacker News says?

  1. syockit · 2025-08-23
    Brings back memories. There was a time when the fork, libav, became the default on Ubuntu, and ffmpeg commands would say "this command is no longer maintained" or so. That was where I learned that there was a fork, and I thought ffmpeg was going to die as a result because there was heavy development activity on libav compared to ffmpeg initially. Surprise, ffmpeg outlived its fork! This post talks about the situatio…

    Comment linking /p/13-the-ffmpeg-libav-situation.html

    on “FFmpeg 8.0”
  2. rbanffy · 2022-11-19

    Submitted Investigating why Steam started picking a random font as a story · 790 points

    HN discussion
  3. ux · 2022-04-03
    I wrote something similar a while back: http://blog.pkh.me/p/15-the-music-classifying-nightmare.html

    Comment linking /p/15-the-music-classifying-nightmare.html

    on “Horrible edge cases when dealing with music”
  4. ux · 2015-03-16

    Submitted High quality GIF with FFmpeg as a story · 482 points

    HN discussion
  5. stirner · 2018-04-22
    When I say libav*, I and most people mean libavformat, libavcodec, libswscale, etc.; the C libraries that form the basis of the command line tool and are widely used elsewhere. libav (no wildcard) is a fork of FFmpeg that is broadly focused on reducing bloat and cleaning up the API. As such, libav tends to add features more slowly, while FFmpeg generally follows all of libav’s new features and bug fixes as well as i…

    Comment linking /p/13-the-ffmpeg-libav-situation.html

    on “FFmpeg 4.0 released”
  6. ibobev · 2025-12-08

    Submitted A series of tricks and techniques I learned doing tiny GLSL demos as a story · 204 points

    HN discussion
  7. bru · 2016-02-15
    > libav [...] promoted as a concerted effort to create a better API True, but that was biased and unfair. Some developers leveraged their Debian influence to get Debian to switch from ffmpeg to libav, but the technical merits were debatable. In the end, they came back to ffmpeg. This is mostly a political issue. Software-wise AFAIK ffmpeg has been integrating many changes from libav but the opposite is not true, mak…

    Comment linking /p/13-the-ffmpeg-libav-situation.html

    on “FFmpeg 3.0 released”
  8. ux · 2025-10-18

    Submitted Fast calculation of the distance to cubic Bezier curves on the GPU as a story · 157 points

    HN discussion
  9. DanBC · 2015-07-31
    http://blog.pkh.me/p/13-the-ffmpeg-libav-situation.html There's probably some great popcorn in mailing lists. Edit: libav have a big "personal conflict resolution" section here which is another hint: http://libav.org/about/

    Comment linking /p/13-the-ffmpeg-libav-situation.html

    on “FFmpeg's future and resigning as leader”
  10. ux · 2012-06-30

    Submitted The FFmpeg/Libav situation as a story · 150 points

    HN discussion
  11. Intermernet · 2015-07-31
    Some info: http://blog.pkh.me/p/13-the-ffmpeg-libav-situation.html There are more links in that post to fill you in on the details.

    Comment linking /p/13-the-ffmpeg-libav-situation.html

    on “FFmpeg's future and resigning as leader”
  12. ux · 2025-06-06

    Submitted Sharing everything I could understand about gradient noise as a story · 137 points

    HN discussion
  13. jorvi · 2019-08-06
    If you check this link[0] you can see most of your statement about FFmpeg merging everything and Libav being all about clean code is just completely false. Apparently lots of hardcoding and weird NIH on the Libav side, and a biased Ubuntu package maintainer to boot. [0] http://blog.pkh.me/p/13-the-ffmpeg-libav-situation.html

    Comment linking /p/13-the-ffmpeg-libav-situation.html

    on “FFmpeg 4.2”
  14. ux · 2024-05-18

    Submitted Fixing the iterative damping interpolation in video games as a story · 127 points

    HN discussion
  15. ktta · 2017-06-05
    Doesn't ffmpeg have a reputation for bad code merge practices? I've heard libav[1], a fork of ffmpeg has much better focus on code quality. Note that ffmpeg frequently merges any new code from libav. So ffmpeg is almost a superset of the both. For anyone wondering why this is, here is a good explanation.[2] [1]: https://www.libav.org/ [2]: http://blog.pkh.me/p/13-the-ffmpeg-libav-situation.html

    Comment linking /p/13-the-ffmpeg-libav-situation.html

    on “Ask HN: What code samples should programmers read?”
  16. ux · 2014-06-21

    Submitted Butchering HQX pixel art scaling filters as a story · 114 points

    HN discussion
  17. ank_the_elder · 2015-07-26
    The fork happened for human reasons (management-related) rather than technical. See http://blog.pkh.me/p/13-the-ffmpeg-libav-situation.html and http://lwn.net/Articles/423703/

    Comment linking /p/13-the-ffmpeg-libav-situation.html

    on “Why Debian returned to FFmpeg”
  18. ibobev · 2025-08-04

    Submitted Perfecting anti-aliasing on signed distance functions as a story · 111 points

    HN discussion
  19. dtech · 2015-07-25
    Also, according to a ffmpeg contributor [1] (who joined after the schism) they just refused to merge anything by ffmpeg, often doing identical functionality from scratch (because users wanted it after seeing it in ffmpeg). Meanwhile ffmpeg merged basically everything from libav. Furthermore ffmpeg made an effort to provide compatibility, even for stuff where libav intentionally broke compatibility. So basically ffmp…

    Comment linking /p/13-the-ffmpeg-libav-situation.html

    on “Why Debian returned to FFmpeg”
  20. ux · 2025-09-29

    Submitted Code golfing a tiny demo using maths and a pinch of insanity as a story · 107 points

    HN discussion
  21. vezzy-fnord · 2014-01-10
    A good entry on this, for those interested: http://blog.pkh.me/p/13-the-ffmpeg-libav-situation.html

    Comment linking /p/13-the-ffmpeg-libav-situation.html

    on “FFmpeg and a thousand fixes”
  22. ux · 2022-08-16

    Submitted Deconstructing Bézier Curves as a story · 105 points

    HN discussion
  23. neeee · 2013-11-16
    No, check out http://blog.pkh.me/p/13-the-ffmpeg-libav-situation.html . While Libav left with the server, bug tracker, etc., the FFmpeg project was restoring itself, with the help of some VideoLAN people (the FFmpeg sources are now hosted on git.videolan.org). Michael also started to merge the Libav changes back into FFmpeg every 1-2 day, with a lot of forgotten, previously rejected, sometimes controversial features…

    Comment linking /p/13-the-ffmpeg-libav-situation.html

    on “Process videos in browser using FFmpeg compiled to JavaScript”
  24. ux · 2012-09-08

    Submitted The music classifying nightmare as a story · 98 points

    HN discussion
  25. birkbork · 2014-07-28
    The reality is not like you describe it. The debian package maintainer of ffmpeg was/is one of the libav guys and decided to replace ffmpeg with libav. Judging by several frustrated comments in this thread, it has obviously been a hurtful decision. There are a few writeups of the situation on the web, here's one: http://blog.pkh.me/p/13-the-ffmpeg-libav-situation.html

    Comment linking /p/13-the-ffmpeg-libav-situation.html

    on “Reintroducing FFmpeg to Debian”
  26. ux · 2015-02-28

    Submitted Templating in C as a story · 78 points

    HN discussion
  27. vezzy-fnord · 2014-07-28
    About time. I'm usually all for forking and variety, but libav truly was an example of those gratuitous and destructive forks that offered no real benefit. Though, ultimately, it was the Debian package maintainers' decision to spread propaganda about ffmpeg being deprecated that was the worst. As a practical example, I was gridlocked when I tried to compile LightSpark from Git, due to libswresample not being present…

    Comment linking /p/13-the-ffmpeg-libav-situation.html

    on “Reintroducing FFmpeg to Debian”
  28. ibobev · 2026-10-05

    Submitted Float and integer arithmetic follow two different paradigms as a story · 67 points

    HN discussion
  29. hitekker · 2025-11-02
    I'm not sure if Kostya's account is truthful. He has a huge axe to grind against ffmpeg https://blog.pkh.me/p/13-the-ffmpeg-libav-situation.html IIRC, his "LibAV" fork was malicious and his people lied a lot to the community ("ffmpeg is now deprecated!"). Ultimately, they failed, but I see a lot of their rhetoric and resentment in Kostya's post today.

    Comment linking /p/13-the-ffmpeg-libav-situation.html

    on “FFmpeg dealing with a security researcher”
  30. signa11 · 2022-08-08

    Submitted From Roots to Polynomials as a story · 33 points

    HN discussion

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