this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
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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

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[–] [email protected] 191 points 7 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 283 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (6 children)

the FFmpeg version is currently used in a highly visible product in Microsoft. We have customers experience issues with Caption during Teams Live Event.

This seems like a "you" problem, Microsoft, and since you employ thousands of programmers with the experience to solve your problem and commit the change back to the FOSS project, I think this is also very easily a "you" solution as well.

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[–] [email protected] 422 points 7 months ago (6 children)

FFMPEG is a core technology. You literally cannot do anything with video without touching FFMPEG at multiple places in the stack.

The fact that we have billions of dollars of revenue flowing through that software every day, but we rely on VOLUNTEERS to maintain it shows exactly how hollow the whole SV entrepreneur culture really is.

Bunch of fucking posers wouldn’t know performance code if it kicked them in the face.

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

QuickTime has entered the chat

[–] [email protected] 196 points 7 months ago (4 children)

The fact that we have billions of dollars of revenue flowing through that software every day, but we rely on VOLUNTEERS to maintain it shows exactly how hollow the whole SV entrepreneur culture really is.

Exactly: I'm not mad about important things being run by volunteers -- arguably, that's a good thing because it means project decisions are made uncorrupted by profit motive -- but I am mad about the profit being reaped elsewhere on the backs of their free labor.

[–] [email protected] 72 points 7 months ago (1 children)

@grue @vzq this is such an interesting space. The general public has no idea how much of their software relies on open source code and voluntary community contributions. There have been so many attempts to figure out a way to compensate these maintainers, but it doesn't seem like anything has really become the defacto solution. Open Collective and Tidelift are the closest things I can think of.

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 7 months ago (3 children)

I am confused. I realize this is just a flag change not even a dev problem but PEBKAC, still - in the event of an actual bug, why wouldn't Microsoft have a dev contribute to the project and fix it instead of just opening a ticket?

[–] [email protected] 42 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Filling an issue quickly is good etiquette. Then you can discuss in the ticket the best way to solve/work around.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 7 months ago

why wouldn’t Microsoft have a dev contribute to the project

because fuck you, that's their thought.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago

You assume MS is competent?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 7 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 66 points 7 months ago (2 children)

The tweet is from today. The ffmpeg team felt like it needed to be said.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 7 months ago (4 children)

Thanks for additional context. I don't open Twitter links anymore because 3/4 of the time the link doesn't work after Musk made changes

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago

The Elon Musk of Twitter or the Elon Musk in the FFMPEG ticket?

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[–] [email protected] 266 points 7 months ago (4 children)

It's so ridiculous that this isn't even brought up:

The Command you provided worked fine. Thank you so much for the help! Really appreciated! We are going to proceed to make a release today and test with customers. Will post the updates here.

Gotta love being a forced beta tester... I mean customer.

[–] [email protected] 124 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

If the live version is already broken, there isn't much to lose deploying the fix as soon as possible. Not sure what else they could have done here.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago (2 children)

There are likely other changes made since they released that version to their customers, so the risk is other things in addition to the current thing get broken.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 7 months ago

Yup. Shits fucked. Do what you can. Lol

[–] [email protected] 139 points 7 months ago (1 children)

That does kind of admit what we all suspected about Microsoft's QA since they fired the whole testing team in 2014.

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[–] [email protected] 215 points 7 months ago (9 children)

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,

Use -data_field first as decoder option in CLI. Default value was changed from first to auto in latest FFmpeg version. Or modify AVOption of same name in API for this decoder.

Thanks @Elon for the reply, This is the command we are currently using: ffmpeg.exe -f lavfi -i movie=flvdecoder_input223.flv[out+subcc] -y -map 0:1 ./output_p.srt

I will be looking to see any updates in the FFmpeg documentation. Can you please elaborate and provide pointers the right decoding options or the right FF command er can use. Thank you!

ffmpeg.exe -data_field first -f lavfi -i movie=flvdecoder_input223.flv[out+subcc] -y -map 0:1 ./output_p.srt

Got that's fucking brutal. This isn't even asking them to fix a bug, it's just basic help-desk shit.

I'm sure Microsoft has some good devs that are a net benefit to the open source projects they use, but this is not one of them.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago

That's the level of an intern that has never even seen a command. Imagine not being able to literally cat a string with another string, aka. add -data_field first to a command.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 7 months ago (3 children)

You got this dumbass at MS and then you've got the other MS guy who's a god damn hero that very well might have saved the world atm lmao

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[–] [email protected] 134 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (6 children)

If you've ever been forced to use Teams you must already know they scraped the bottom of their talent barrel for the team that works on it... The software is shit, riddled with bugs to the point where at one point I used to only be able to use teams on my browser because the desktop app just decided to never let me access the text chat, and the browser version I would load it would be a white screen and I would have to refresh 3 times for it to load. But at least it worked after those 3 refreshes. And it was exactly 3 refreshes every single time, never 2, never 4, and 5 was right out. It was always without fail 3 refreshes. Whether loading from Firefox, Chrome, or Edge. Fortunately we don't have too many meetings with people using Teams these days, so I haven't had to use it in a while, but its easily in my top 5 worst software I've been forced to deal with. Maybe Top 3. But its still miles behind Magento. Fuck Magento, just thinking of it right now gets my blood pumping and I refused to work with it ever again about 10 years ago... Fuck Magento. Teams is at least a distant 2nd or 3rd to that. Absolute crap.

[–] [email protected] 78 points 7 months ago (4 children)

I'm convinced it's the whole B-2-B software world at this point. The shit starts at MS (or any of the FAANGS) and rolls downhill to everyone else.

We're working on a huge Dynamics 365 thing at work, and one of the third parties we use for automated testing is just.... the product seems barebones, is clearly built on top of open source automated testing tool, and is riddled with indicators that barely anyone works there, from the AI help bot to the "submit a ticket and we'll assign it eventually" approach to all other interactions.

I looked them up on Linked In and 12 people work there. 8 of them have C-suite or VP titles, and 4 of them are interns from a local university. This is the state of all modern tech: a board room full of investors, a website, and a product barely glued together from FOSS parts by interns. If you wonder why everything feels like a scam now it's because it is.

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[–] [email protected] 45 points 7 months ago

Lmao even after providing a well explained answer, they still had to manually add the flag to their command for them.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 7 months ago

Fucking suits. They don't even care about the bottom-line, they just care about their own salary and benefits.

Pay for support or get fucked M$

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

[–] [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] 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.

[–] [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.

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