[FFmpeg-devel] Re: [POLL][VOTE] Revoke social media delegation

[Lynne via ffmpeg-devel <ffmpeg-devel@ffmpeg.org>]

On 26/10/2025 16:26, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> Hi Everyone
> 
> As requested, reposting this, as a new thread
> 
> For context please see:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VkcAvqV24c
> https://lists.ffmpeg.org/archives/list/ffmpeg-devel@ffmpeg.org/thread/PZL3NMBYJJ7RHEJ2NEGE26R2HHXKRQ2S/
> Subject: Twitter/X spat on Youtube
> 
> Should the delegation, from where this came from, be revoked to FFmpeg social media?
> (vote ends in 7 days)
> 
> Please reply on ffmpeg-devel with your choice:
> 
> [R] revoke access
> 
> [K] keep access

K

I think Kieran has been doing a good job with our X account.
His approach to spreading awareness about what we do may be 
unconventional and confrontational, but its this is how engagement works 
on social networks. And I like engagement - it gives our project a name, 
rather than simply being brick #23 in xkcd #2347.

I looked at the video, and I failed to understand the author's points - 
he said how integration is difficult, and our reply of asking for 
patches was rude. Then he went off on a tangent that VLC releases are 
too far apart, then went on about how we have responsibilities to listen 
to and fix issues that large users of ffmpeg have, and our repeated 
response of asking for patches was rude, even though he has donated and 
built a company's infra using our code?
We're volunteers, and we're absolved of responsibility of our code. As a 
project, we don't have to treat someone as special because they used our 
work or donated. Asking for patches is pretty standard - we even have an 
error code. By looking into issues and writing, you either fix the 
issue, or very quickly gain an appreciation for why the issue has not 
been fixed yet, in a way that goes beyond argument.

Integration can be difficult to someone lacking knowledge of our APIs. 
We have a very low-level API. It's not something that can be improved 
specifically -- it gives API users freedom. From our community, there 
are projects that wrap the API to give users far easier time with 
decoding, seeking, filtering, and, encoding.
There were plans to integrate a high-level API at some point, but 
there's enough of an ecosystem built around our existing API to give 
users a far wider choice in terms of abstractions and languages than an 
official high-level API.
I do agree our project can be a pain to build and integrate - switching 
to meson would solve this as far as my use cases go, as well as many 
other projects using our libraries.

Donations are appreciated as they help keep our infra going, as well as 
very rare trips and hardware when we agree on them, but we as developers 
don't have free access to them, so its difficult for us to gauge their 
impact beyond a number.
An effective way of asking us to fix something is to approach us 
directly. Incidentally, if someone at Twitch or X is reading this, give 
me a call if you'd like to see our AAC encoder improved.
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