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
Hilariously the issue was just a setting change in the update, that you can easily change via a command option. They saw thing didn’t work, and didn’t read the change log at all before asking to pay a one time fee to guarantee it be maintained for them.
So ffmpeg gets a few thousand dollars for such a simple answer/solution? Sounds good to me?
The problem is that Microsoft wants to pay that for a permanent “never maintain in a way that breaks caption decoding in any default behaviour we use” with that one time payment.
Its a quick fix on Microsofts end to change a quick flag in ffmpeg. It’s also quick on their end to maintain a fork that only changes the default. One time payments for maintenance make open source projects like ffmpeg subject to fail.
Yes, they should have read the update notes. But I don’t see much in the way of documentation regarding the data_field cli option in their documentation even now.