Jean-Baptiste Kempf

key eras and key people that made this possible.

Fabrice Berlard, as you mentioned, creating the concept.

And then probably in the 2000s era, I would call the era's tour of FMPEG is that the 2000s era was Michael Niedermeyer.

So key things he got done was exhaustive support for DivX and Xvid at the time and all sorts of weird variants of what's known as MPEG-4 Part 2.

So this predates...

the MPEG-4 part 10 that we used to.

So this was 2000s era video codecs where there were flavor after flavor of weird decoders.

At the time in the 2000s, you needed a new player to play every different type of file format.

So there was Windows Media Player to play Windows media formats.

There was Real Player to play real media formats.

And those were the other key thing in FFmpeg at the time were native decoders for those.

I actually do remember being a teenager.

I must have been figuring out there was this one player that could play

could decode these files without having separate bloated players because at the time when you downloaded real player there was a ton of other stuff in there a ton of ads a ton of other things and just having a simple library that was fast led to that and then i think 2008 was a 2008 onwards was a big change because that's when h.264 got its maturity and i think something hopefully we'll talk about a bit more this was the beginning of high definition video

So H.264 was the key decoder of that.

So I'd call that the late 2000s and 2010s, and that's when the big reverse engineers came along and really did astonishing work.

The beginning was a single player that could play Xvid DivX...

Windows Media and RealPlay was already a massive achievement in itself.

Without codec packs, without weird stuff you had to download that had weird ads and weird spyware.

At the time, that wasn't.