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
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.
@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.
arguably, that’s a good thing because it means project decisions are made uncorrupted by profit motive
Argue-er here, chiming in. This statement could be interpreted as considering only half of the central relationship of capitalism. (Capitalism isn’t just about deriving profit from the control of surplus, it’s about the relationship between surplus and scarcity. Surplus doesn’t mean shit if no one wants what you have.)
The decisions that volunteers make may not be motivated by the desire/ability to make profit, but they can be (and often are) motivated by the opposite; they have to account for the fact that their volunteer work is labor that isn’t contributing to their survival – aka, their day job. The demands placed on them by their other responsibilities will have to take precedence over the volunteer project.
In practice, this means they have to take shortcuts and/or do less than they would like to, because they don’t have time to devote to it. It’s not exactly the same end product as if it was profit-seeking, since that can tempt maintainers into using dark patterns etc, but they’re similar.
Ideally, they would have all the money they needed, didn’t have to have regular jobs, but also had families/friends/hobbies that would keep them from over-engineering ffmpeg.
To say this in a simpler/shorter way (TD;DR), their decisions can be motivated by the fact that they aren’t making money from it, don’t have enough time or resources to do everything they might want.
(Why is this so long?? I’m bored in the train, gotta kill the time somehow…why not say in 1000 words what I could have said in 100)
They’re not going to invest in it if they don’t own it, and frankly I’m happy they don’t.
Those same companies tell you that their products that you paid for don’t belong to you. You are just buying a license to use them. Sadly, this asinine concept is spreading even to hardware markets.
I think it’s fair to ask them to take their own bitter pill. They should also invest without owning.
Bunch of fucking posers wouldn’t know performance code if it kicked them in the face.
You mean JavaScript right?
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
There is zero chance that they’ll just build from the latest main branch and release that tomorrow. Or that whatever build they make goes directly to general distribution.
They’ll make a build from the last release plus this patch and send it to a few customers who have complained. Then they’ll think about making a release with this and perhaps other bug fixes.
Can’t reproduce bug. Closing ticket.
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.
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 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.
We’re working on a huge Dynamics 365 thing at work
So I had two interviews at a Dynamics 365 partner, until they ended up restructuring internally and said they’d “get in contact if they have need for new devs”… Then later I interviewed at an Odoo partner, got the job and ya know what? I’m glad I didn’t get the Dynamics 365 partner job. Not only is our core product FOSS, it actually feels pretty nice as an end user too.
You probably can’t change things at your job, which sucks, but anyone looking at ERP solutions should probably consider Odoo as an option.
There’s a reason Teams is/was shit.
The first teams was written in AngularJS (which is a slow to run resource hog, but fast to develop) wrapped in Electron. It was kind of a minimum viable product, just to build something quickly to get some feedback and stats on what people needed.
The plan was to build a new native version of teams and build it into the next windows while having an web fallback (built on react) for everyone else.
They stopped working on the original teams and started working on the new versions.
They got half-way through working on the native and react versions when suddenly, covid happened.
They couldn’t keep working on the new versions because they wouldn’t be ready for a while, so they had to go back and resume development on the old one, introducing patch after patch to quickly get more features in there (like more than 2 webcam streams per call).
Eventually covid subsided and they were able to resume development on the new teams versions.
Windows 11 launched with a native teams version (which has less features but runs super quick), and the new react based teams (which can now be downloaded in a webview2 wrapper) has been in open beta since late last year (if you’ve seen the “Try the new Teams” toggle, then you’ve seen this). The React+Webview2 teams will replace the AngularJS+Electron version as the default on July 7th.
“New Teams” has been so painful for me, but if I understand correctly that is because my work is still on Windows 10. The Windows 11 version works better than the React version?
So what do microsoft’s crack teams working at? typescript? xbox? vscode? Because those are the smoothest microsoft products I tried so far. The rests seem to get the bottom of the barrel these days.
Seems like they are mostly trying to pawn off their issues onto unpaid volunteers instead of doing any actual development.
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
Jon Skeet? He’s my hero, but he hasn’t worked at MS for quite some time I believe.
He’s talking about Andres Freund, who uncovered the OpenSSL backdoor that was slipped into liblzma from the xz malicious maintainer. Dude saw a valgrind error and a function with a fixed runtime was taking too long and using too much CPU and reversed out and saved a major ssh backdoor from going upstream as Fedora was going to release it just days later.
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…
I’m sure Microsoft has some good devs
I’m sure they do too, but I’ve been surprised many times by the former coworkers I’ve learned have ended up working for Microsoft. To put it politely, they were generally not the best programmers I’ve ever worked with.
