Microsoft opens a "high priority" bug ticket in ffmpeg, attempting to leech the free labour of the maintainers
Microsoft opens a "high priority" bug ticket in ffmpeg, attempting to leech the free labour of the maintainers
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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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.
Name and shame!
I wouldn’t be surprised to find out it’s Atlassian/JIRA
Found the guy who created the FFMpeg ticket on LinkedIn. Job title: "Principal software engineer", saying they are "A detailed, analytical Software Engineer with Eighteen years of experience". 18 years?! Fuck me dead...
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?
The windows 11 teams runs better, but if you're using a school or work account, you need to use the old AngularJS+Electron version, or the new React+Webview2 version.
So for the time being, the Windows 11 teams is more catered for personal use only. It's kind of like a modern reboot of Microsoft's old MSN Messenger. It was included in Windows 11 (rebranded as "Chat") but it's been unbundled from Windows 11 installs and I think rebranded again. But not having the school/work account support means not a lot of people use it.
The transition between the AngularJS+Electron version and the React+Webview2 versions is happening now. At some point soon, anyone who is running an OS too old to run the new teams will be forced to use the browser version.
So after their transition, we'll have to wait and see if they add the school/work account support to the native version because everyone using teams right now only uses those accounts.
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.
Lmao even after providing a well explained answer, they still had to manually add the flag to their command for them.
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 highly doubt that he works at Microsoft since his username is Elon Musk.
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.
It’s basically the new IBM.
That's the level of an intern that has never even seen a command. Imagine not being able to literally cat a string with another string, aka. add -data_field first to a command.
Raymond Chen. Hilariously enough, his best blog posts involve him jumping through hoops for MSFT customers with support contracts.
That, but they couldn't even insert the advised parameter to the command themselves, instead they had the capacity to basically demand improvement to the documentation, from those "filthy ffmpeg developers"