[memco]

The article seemed to have a nice level of detail without being too light or heavy: nice job!

At the end you discussed how you moved from C to Rust to Go for this: I’m assuming the interface with ffmpeg is inconsequential to the language choice so I’m curious to read more about what has motivated you to make those changes and where you might go next. Do you see any potential for replacing parts or all of ffmpeg or is it a foregone conclusion that ffmoeg will be the core of the project?

[zoriya]

In C, I was using ffmpeg's functions directly instead of their CLI. I was manually decoding packets, frames and so on. Having to do all of this, I quickly became familiar with how ffmpeg works (and got able to read their source code) ; but this level of control was unneeded to create a HLS multi-variant stream. I made more sense to simply call ffmpeg via it's CLI interface and use a higher level language to manage states.

I then moved to rust, mostly because I was curious about the language. When I decided to use the original's video keyframes I needed to rewrite everything anyway, so I decided to change language at this time. The CLI interface did not change but using golang made state management easier since it has great tooling for (goroutines, concurrent maps, channels...). Rust lacks those tools, and it was hard to handle mutexes and so on.

[social_quotient]

I’d be curious if people really ever switch from ffmpeg and if yes, what to?

[zoriya]

Yes I agree, ffmpeg handles every video format, codeces and hardware accelerators for us. I don't see how we could replace that.