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
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.
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.
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.
They’re not going to invest in it if they don’t own it, and frankly I’m happy they don’t.
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.
That does kind of admit what we all suspected about Microsoft’s QA since they fired the whole testing team in 2014.
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.
Tell Copilot to fix it.
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.
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.
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.
Found the guy who created the FFMpeg ticket on LinkedIn. Job title: “Principal software engineer at Microsoft”, saying they are “A detailed, analytical Software Engineer with Eighteen years of experience”. 18 years?! Fuck me dead…
Can someone enlighten me why a one-time payment of a few thousand for a bugfix is unacceptable? I feel like I’m missing something.
Can’t reproduce bug. Closing ticket.
It’s what Microsoft would do in the same situation. It’s only fair
I understand you are having a problem with ffmpeg.
Firstly, I will need you to open a command prompt and run SFC /scannow.
And then reboot your PC.
And then run SFC /scannow again.
And reboot again.
Until you give up and reinstall Windows.
11 months ago
The tweet is from today. The ffmpeg team felt like it needed to be said.
I love how that PM brings up the fact that this is needed for a product launch. Like who cares?
Need to add a ‘not for use with Microsoft products, including operating systems’ clause for a version or two.
I think adoption of the JSLint license’s ”This software can oly be used for good and not evil" clause would cover that. I hear IBMs lawyers had issue with it lol
Yes, but they were satisfied when IBM was given a license to use JSLint for evil.
