Kieran Kunhya

Kunhya said donations to FFmpeg increased substantially after the public dispute but still do not cover a single full-time developer.

“Donations have increased substantially. They're still not enough to cover even a single full-time developer”

Lex Fridman Podcast: #496 – FFmpeg: The Incredible Technology Behind Video on the Internet (May 6, 2026) · Listen from 1:25:42

Kunhya argued FFmpeg democratized video production, putting individuals and trillion-dollar corporations on the same technology stack.

“I think it's incredible that your home videos, your grandmother's home videos and trillion-dollar corporations effectively are on a level playing field using the same technology stack”

Lex Fridman Podcast: #496 – FFmpeg: The Incredible Technology Behind Video on the Internet (May 6, 2026) · Listen from 36:19

Kunhya said each codec generation's roughly 30% compression gain comes at one to two orders of magnitude more CPU cost.

“It's 30% better, but an order of magnitude, perhaps even two orders of magnitude more compression power”

Lex Fridman Podcast: #496 – FFmpeg: The Incredible Technology Behind Video on the Internet (May 6, 2026) · Listen from 22:50

Kunhya said roughly 45% of video files cannot be decoded on the GPU and must fall back to software decoding.

“I think it's up to 45% of files are not GPU decodable”

Lex Fridman Podcast: #496 – FFmpeg: The Incredible Technology Behind Video on the Internet (May 6, 2026) · Listen from 18:06

Kunhya said the archiving community funded the lossless FFV1 codec and GPU encoding in FFmpeg because preserving multimedia heritage in a playable form is a long-term concern.

“They funded the development of the FFV1 codec. So that's a lossless codec”

Lex Fridman Podcast: #496 – FFmpeg: The Incredible Technology Behind Video on the Internet (May 6, 2026) · Listen from 4:06:08

Kunhya said x264's breakthrough was rejecting PSNR-driven optimization in favour of psychovisual rate distortion and adaptive quantization.

“Two big things, psychovisual rate distortion. So using block energy, trying to compensate for human perception when making decisions”

Lex Fridman Podcast: #496 – FFmpeg: The Incredible Technology Behind Video on the Internet (May 6, 2026) · Listen from 2:56:25

Kunhya said Rust has an 'Esperanto vibe' and that Rust rewrites must match or exceed existing feature sets and testing rigour before they can replace incumbents.

“It has a very big Esperanto vibe about it. It's like, we're going to solve this and we're doing this in a particular way”

Lex Fridman Podcast: #496 – FFmpeg: The Incredible Technology Behind Video on the Internet (May 6, 2026) · Listen from 2:31:00

Kunhya said hand-written SIMD in FFmpeg yields 10x to 50x speed improvements over compiled C, not marginal percentage gains.

“when we write SIMD is we have a 10X, not percentage, 10X to 50X speed improvement”

Lex Fridman Podcast: #496 – FFmpeg: The Incredible Technology Behind Video on the Internet (May 6, 2026) · Listen from 2:09:47

Kunhya criticised the security industry for marking trivial issues as high severity, saying constant alarmism erodes credibility.

“at some point, the security industry needs to realize you can't keep crying wolf like this”

Lex Fridman Podcast: #496 – FFmpeg: The Incredible Technology Behind Video on the Internet (May 6, 2026) · Listen from 1:18:31