Hacker News: streaming

New comment by streaming in "Wedeo – a Rust Rewrite of FFmpeg"

streaming — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 22:44:02 +0000

The benefit is that you and other Rust developers could potentially implement improvements to FFMPEG. Again, if you stick to porting only the top layer of FFMPEG - the media processing framework with the CLI - you can still keep the rest as C and link it all together in a build. Your Rust version (and any improvements implemented by other Rust developers who contribute to wedeo) can easily be converted back to C so that patches could be offered back upstream to the main FFMPEG project.

New comment by streaming in "Wedeo – a Rust Rewrite of FFmpeg"

streaming — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 03:25:03 +0000

Good answer. Asking an AI coding agent to port a C codebase to Rust is clearly and obviously creating a derivative work. You need to follow the terms of the LGPL license, and your Rust fork of FFMPEG must be licensed as LGPL. Videolan holds the copyright to FFMPEG, and that includes derivative works. LGPL allows you to do exactly what you're doing. Note that if you convert x264, x265 or any of the other GPL v2 libraries, your Rust version of those libraries will be GPL v2. When builds of FFMPEG are created with GPL v2 libraries, the entire build becomes GPL v2 (which has a more restrictive copyleft provision than LGPL).

New comment by streaming in "Wedeo – a Rust Rewrite of FFmpeg"

streaming — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:27:10 +0000

FFMPEG is a media processing framework. Of course, it is normally built with the many encoders, decoders and filters that do the actual media processing work. Those components are separate open source projects. The performance critical part of FFMPEG is in the component encoders, decoders and filters, not the framework that sets up the media processing graph, gets it running and monitors it. It could be useful or interesting to have a Rust port of FFMPEG (for developers who might want to contribute new features). I wouldn't bother trying to port component encoders, decoders or filters from C to Rust. There is no need, and no benefit. They are mostly older and stable. Rust will never be faster than C, even if you link all the hand-optimized assembly code. The challenge of maintaining a Rust fork of FFMPEG will be to stay current with changes to FFMPEG. LLMs are very good at converting from one language to another, so it might be feasible, especially if you can automate it. But I would definitely stick to using Rust only for the top layer of FFMPEG.

New comment by streaming in "25 Years of Wikipedia"

streaming — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 19:59:07 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden vs. https://grokipedia.com/page/Hunter_Biden

New comment by streaming in "25 Years of Wikipedia"

streaming — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 19:09:47 +0000

Grokipedia is impressive. All edits to the original Wikipedia article are shown, along with source links for the edit. All anyone has to do is to look at a wikipedia article and the Grokipedia article side by side to see that Grok is usually able to make significant improvements to articles, adding important context, improving explanations and removing bias. Don't knock it 'til you've tried it. If you haven't tried it because of a hatred of Elon Musk... well... who's the biased one?

New comment by streaming in "Amazon MGM Studios will gain creative control of the James Bond franchise"

streaming — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 16:34:09 +0000

... by buying her out.

New comment by streaming in "The Hype Around Photobiomodulation"

streaming — Sun, 04 Aug 2024 16:13:23 +0000

It's always healthy to be skeptical, but we know that on the whole, sunlight is healthy for humans. People who get more sun exposure live longer (even though they have a higher incidence of melanoma). We know that it's more than just the Vitamin D that is produce when our skin is exposed to sun. There are numerous studies showing the benefits of sunshine, so the next question is "what is the mechanism for sunshine to improve human health?". One theory is that it stimulates the production of intra-cellular melatonin. A seminal paper on this topic is "Melatonin and the Optics of the Human Body".... http://sininenankka.dy.fi/~sami/kielletyt_uutiset/melatonin_...

New comment by streaming in "Soda additive linked to thyroid toxicity may finally get banned by FDA"

streaming — Mon, 06 Nov 2023 22:05:22 +0000

No, it's not the same. Molecules act very differently than the individual elements that make the molecule. Water does not behave similarly to hydrogen or oxygen, and humans aren't plants, which can break water into component elements. What happens to the bromine when humans ingest brominated vegetable oil? Something very different than what happens when we ingest water, which always stays stable as a water molecule.

New comment by streaming in "Soda additive linked to thyroid toxicity may finally get banned by FDA"

streaming — Mon, 06 Nov 2023 21:59:12 +0000

True. Fluoridated water does more harm than good.

New comment by streaming in "Soda additive linked to thyroid toxicity may finally get banned by FDA"

streaming — Sun, 05 Nov 2023 07:28:34 +0000

Most people are deficient in iodine. We don't eat a lot of iodine rich foods, and commercial farming techniques have depleted soils of many minerals and elements. Tissues in the body that should be absorbing and storing iodine, which is an essential element for thyroid hormone, will preferentially store bromine. Bromine has also been used to make flame retardant fabrics, carpet, furniture, etc. Avoid it.

New comment by streaming in "Open source is not about you (2018)"

streaming — Sat, 02 Jul 2022 21:55:06 +0000

As someone who started and ran a very successful open source project, I feel his pain. You get a large following of adopters, some of whom feel entitled to demand features or priority for bug fixes even though they aren't contributing anything to the project. If they don't get what they want, they start bad-mouthing you in order to bring more pressure. After about 6 months of observing this, I finally had a good discussion with my brilliant Principal Architect, who helped me respond as follows... If you would like a new feature or bug fix, you have the following options; 1 - Improve the code yourself. 2 - Pay someone to improve the code. 3 - Ask nicely, and wait patiently. Or, 4 - Openly criticize the project leads.

If it were me, I wouldn't choose option 4. But that's just me.

Once I posted this to the main forum thread where people discussed the project, most of the participants rallied to support me, and peer pressured in the discussion threads helped keep open source entitlement to a minimum.