Top all-time · #3820
Kostya's Boring Codec World
Personal blog · codecs.multimedia.cxsystemshistory
Kostya's Boring Codec World is a personal blog at codecs.multimedia.cx about systems and history. Since 2015, 20 different Hacker News readers have linked it 35 times, most often “Why I am sceptical about AV1”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-31, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (12) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Kostya's blog for insider history of FFmpeg and Libav and for commentary on codecs such as AV1 and H.266, written by a former FFmpeg developer who is now building a Rust decoder.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 12 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Why I am sceptical about AV13 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2018-12-08
- Ffhistory: Fabrice Bellard3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-12-30
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-06-19
- A History of the FFmpeg Project2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-01-28
- /?p=3392 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-08-01
What Hacker News says?
> This is mostly a political issue. Let us not forget the reasons for libav. The ffmpeg development process was having a lot of problems due to very controversial decisions that its lead dev was taking. The libav fork has resulted in a restructuring of the ffmpeg development workflow. In this regard, libav is about as important as egcs was to gcc. Further reading: http://codecs.multimedia.cx/?p=339
Comment linking /?p=339
on “FFmpeg 3.0 released”Submitted Rust: Not So Great For Codec Implementing as a story · 215 points
HN discussionI think he may be referring to AV1's economics weakness. Not the actual quality itself. As in the cost to bring quality to this level while disregarding encoder and decoder complexity. Kostya has a rant about it here [1]. He was the guy that made Real Video work across all platform . Personally I am giving the industry a benefits of doubt and one last chance on VVC / H.266. [1] https://codecs.multimedia.cx/2018/12/w…
Comment linking /2018/12/why-i-am-sceptical-about-av1/
on “AMD Ryzen 4000 Mobile APUs”Submitted Looking at Zig Programming Language as a story · 181 points
HN discussionJust to add context: this is a post from a person involved in the project since 2004. It is a bit bitter but I found it interesting to read ("What happened to FFmpeg" by Kostya) http://codecs.multimedia.cx/?p=339
Comment linking /?p=339
on “FFmpeg's future and resigning as leader”Submitted I still like C and strongly dislike C++ as a story · 164 points
HN discussion>Why can't a $1K general purpose computer efficiently decode a royalty-free codec Well the Codec is Royalty Free but not Patents Free. You only get to use it as long as you don't engage in patent litigations against Google. And Apple does not have an major stake in H.265 or H.264 or every H.26x codec. It has a very minor stake, in the an Open Codec, not closed. Comparatively Speaking every H.26x Codec is more open t…
Comment linking /2018/12/why-i-am-sceptical-about-av1/
on “New 2019 MacBook Air features a slower SSD than 2018 model”Submitted My Rust experience after eight years as a story · 57 points
HN discussion>Hardware support from vendors has been a key consideration from the inception of the AV1 project. If that was the case AV1 spec version 1.0 would not have been postponed multiple times simply because the spec did not had any hardware decoder cost / performance in mind. And then there was the errata to version 1.0 which makes it incompatible to AV1 1.0. [1] Those vendors being a member of AOM means literally just a…
Comment linking /2018/12/why-i-am-sceptical-about-av1/
on “SVT-AV1: open-source AV1 encoder and decoder”Submitted Why Rust is not a mature programming language as a story · 40 points
HN discussion>Company, which has every reason to exaggerate, claims it can improve encoding speed by 32.2% against x265 veryslow "It’ll be interesting to see if we find out more info and are able to test this encoder in the coming months." >BBC, which has no skin in the game, claims AV1 is less efficient than HEVC "I would call this test flawed as AV1 has consistently shown to perform better than HEVC." Every article on AV1 that…
Comment linking /2018/12/why-i-am-sceptical-about-av1/
on “AV1 codec ecosystem update”Submitted Why I’m not excited about RISC-V as a story · 6 points
HN discussionKostya fanned the flames https://codecs.multimedia.cx/2011/10/why-ffmpeg-is-better-th... As for "his" ownership, I think LibAV was a failure each team member should own and comes to terms with. That's my point and also why I won't dig more. The author hasn't come to terms with his bad experience with ffmpeg, in LibAV or otherwise. Whatever the baggage is, it feels quite messy and heavy. It weighs down the article, w…
Comment linking /2011/10/why-ffmpeg-is-better-than-libav-by-numbers-but-not-in-reality/
on “FFmpeg dealing with a security researcher”Submitted Why I am sceptical about AV1 as a story · 4 points
HN discussionKostya (ex-FFmpeg developer)'s take on the behaviour of the FFmpeg twitter account: https://codecs.multimedia.cx/2025/11/ffpropaganda/
Comment linking /2025/11/ffpropaganda/
on “FFmpeg dealing with a security researcher”Submitted Winamp recent code release includes VP5 and VP6 codecs source code as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> Follow the blog: https://codecs.multimedia.cx/ but there's no source code release yet AFAIK. Nice; though the documentation/blog is quite hard to follow :)
Comment linking /
on “Security Bulletin VLC 3.0.11”Submitted Ffhistory: Fabrice Bellard as a story · 3 points
HN discussionKostya (long time ffmpeg contributor from e.g. RV40 reverse engineering) moved on to writing a greenfield ffmpeg alternative purely in Rust, with all new codecs, named NihAV. Follow the blog: https://codecs.multimedia.cx/ but there's no source code release yet AFAIK.
Comment linking /
on “Security Bulletin VLC 3.0.11”Submitted The sorry state of open source multimedia as a story · 2 points
HN discussionNot really. https://codecs.multimedia.cx/2022/12/ffhistory-fabrice-bella... >Fabrice won International Obfuscated C Code Contest three times and you need a certain mindset to create code like that—which creeps into your other work. So despite his implementation of FFmpeg was fast-working, it was not very nice to debug or refactor, especially if you’re not Fabrice
Comment linking /2022/12/ffhistory-fabrice-bellard/
on “Fabrice Bellard: Biography [pdf]”Submitted A History of the FFmpeg Project as a story · 2 points
HN discussionYou can this series of blog posts by one of key people involved in FFmepg: https://codecs.multimedia.cx/category/cempeg/ffhistory/ This was discussed here too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34555465
Comment linking /category/cempeg/ffhistory/
on “The FFmpeg/Libav situation (2012)”Submitted Visiting Multimedia Grave as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted On the Origin of Bloatware as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted An upcoming image format war? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted H.264 Specification Sucks as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted FFhistory: ProRes as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted On the Origins of Ruscism as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted FFhistory: Conclusion as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
