Top all-time · #3153
Content @ Multimedia.cx
Personal blog · multimedia.cx/eggs · on HN as DarkShikariprogrammingsystems
Content @ Multimedia.cx is a personal blog at multimedia.cx about programming and systems. Since 2009, 23 different Hacker News readers have linked it 27 times, most often “Google’s YouTube Uses FFmpeg”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (9) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link multimedia.cx posts as evidence that YouTube has used FFmpeg, and for notes on black-box reverse engineering, hand-rolled compression and FFmpeg build-time tests.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 9 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- /eggs/googles-youtube-uses-ffmpeg/3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-12-20
- Google’s YouTube Uses FFmpeg2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-08-01
- Asm.js performance closing in on GCC (Android and Desktop)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-03-01
What Hacker News says?
So youtube used ffmpeg quite extensively. https://multimedia.cx/eggs/googles-youtube-uses-ffmpeg/ It wouldn't be too surprising if they still did.
Comment linking /eggs/googles-youtube-uses-ffmpeg/
on “FFmpeg is 20 years old today”Submitted Google’s YouTube Uses FFmpeg as a story · 92 points
HN discussionIt is interesting that YouTube isn't mentioned in this blogpost, despite there being good evidence that ffmpeg has been used there[1]. The fuzz testing they mention is based around constructing malformed (or at least "exotic") input files and then monitoring for failures... ie simulating exactly the kind of attack someone might use against YouTube's transcoding infrastructure. [1] http://multimedia.cx/eggs/googles-y…
Comment linking /eggs/googles-youtube-uses-ffmpeg/
on “FFmpeg and a thousand fixes”Submitted My SBC Collection as a story · 71 points
HN discussionNo, compression was used extensively. Just often hand-rolled and for specific things. https://multimedia.cx/eggs/nes-compression/ has a link to an RLE implementation used in some Zelda game.
Comment linking /eggs/nes-compression/
on “Recompiling the Lost Vikings”Submitted VP8: The Savior Codec as a story · 56 points
HN discussionFor those who didn't know "black box" reverse engineering - systems are observed without examining internal structure. "white box" reverse engineering - the inner workings of the system are inspected. http://www.chillingeffects.org/reverse/faq.cgi#QID188 http://multimedia.cx/eggs/black-box-re/
Comment linking /eggs/black-box-re/
on “Broadcom releases an open-source driver for its wireless chipsets”Submitted Understanding the Dreamcast GD-ROM Layout as a story · 53 points
HN discussion> JPEG encoding, for instance, utilizes an O(n*log(n)) frequency analysis algorithm called a Discrete Cosine Transform. Scuse me? JPEG's frequency transform is a set of fixed linear transforms and is always 8x8, so this step is just O(n) of the area of the image. Also, it's not really "a DCT", just any approximation that will look good when run through the approximation of the opposite transform at the other side. S…
Comment linking /eggs/dct-pr/
on “Ex-YouTube Man Builds Graphics Card for Entire Internet”Submitted Xbox Sphinx Protocol as a story · 13 points
HN discussionSome various complaints: 1. http://hardwarebug.org/ Mans covers a lot of incredible retardation here, particularly on ARM and PPC platforms, such as cases where GCC generates 2-3 times the number of instructions necessary for no good reason. 1b. http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=62#comments Until extremely recently, GCC's handling of multiplications of non-native types has been hilariously bad, up to and including loa…
Comment linking /eggs/last-performance-smackdown-for-awhile/
on “Gcc Misinterprets Trivial Loop as Infinite”Submitted Asm.js performance closing in on GCC (Android and Desktop) as a story · 6 points
HN discussionGoogle's use of ffmpeg: https://multimedia.cx/eggs/googles-youtube-uses-ffmpeg/ For encoding, recently, they've built their own ASIC to deal with H264 and VP9 encoding (for 7-33x faster encoding compared to CPU-only): https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/04/youtube-is-now-build...
Comment linking /eggs/googles-youtube-uses-ffmpeg/
on “FFmpeg Lands CLI Multi-Threading as Its "Most Complex Refactoring" in Decades”Submitted ISO-9660 Compromise, Part 2: Finding Root as a story · 4 points
HN discussionAs someone who once had access to internal fleetwide profiling information, yes. There is older evidence based on quirks in encoding. https://multimedia.cx/eggs/googles-youtube-uses-ffmpeg/
Comment linking /eggs/googles-youtube-uses-ffmpeg/
on “Weekly reminder that FFmpeg powers all online video”Submitted Playing With Emscripten and ASM.js as a story · 4 points
HN discussionCircumstantial evidence that they used to: https://multimedia.cx/eggs/googles-youtube-uses-ffmpeg/ These days they use special hardware accelerators: https://gwern.net/doc/cs/hardware/2021-ranganathan.pdf
Comment linking /eggs/googles-youtube-uses-ffmpeg/
on “Reverse-Engineering YouTube: Revisited”Submitted Running Windows XP in 2016 as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIt's very much a case-by-case thing. On my quad-core Phenom 9650, with 8GB of RAM, I tried building FFMPEG using -j1 through -j10. Build times dropped until I got to -j9, which meant that, for my system, the fastest build occured when I ran -jN where N was 2x my CPU cores. This is the only place I documented it: http://multimedia.cx/eggs/ffmpeg-and-multiple-build-threads/...
Comment linking /eggs/ffmpeg-and-multiple-build-threads/
on “Timing the Linux -j(cpu+1) Myth”Submitted The Big VP8 Debug as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Legal fights between forks on FFmpeg logo as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Decoding VP8 On A Sega Dreamcast as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Developing MobyCAIRO as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Reverse Engineering Clue Chronicles Compression as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Evolution of Multimedia Fiefdoms as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted What Every Programmer Should Know (multimedia edition) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Looking at today's VP8 open-sourcing as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
