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Microsoft opens a "high priority" bug ticket in ffmpeg, attempting to leech the free labour of the maintainers (trac.ffmpeg.org)

submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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] 279 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (3 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.

[–] [email protected] 66 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

This is pretty funny, kinda suggests they have no faith in the engineers they work with... ffmpeg is an awesome piece of work, but if it's a bug they can repeat to some level, then like you said, it 100% a them problem!

E: oh, was thinking it was a pm raised it, but seems it was possibly one of their developers, brutal....

[–] [email protected] 36 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Use -data_field first as decoder option in CLI. Default value was changed from first to auto in latest FFmpeg version.

It seems like ffmpeg made a breaking change to their API, and I expect a lot of users to have problems.

[–] [email protected] 64 points 7 months ago

On one hand that's fair, but on the other hand Microsoft is the biggest name in software development and ffmpeg is a volunteer gig, this is probably a problem the megacorp can handle.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 7 months ago (2 children)

But then it'd cost them money.

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

It is frustrating that people no longer stop and think about the money anymore :(

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

They offered a one time gift in the thousands of dollars. They were planning to do that anyway.