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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282 points
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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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68 points
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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…

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36 points

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.

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64 points

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.

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19 points

But then it’d cost them money.

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7 points

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

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5 points

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

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