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I'm finishing up a project for a client that does some pretty neat stuff w/ IP cameras. Everything is running on a CentOS 5 box and I needed a newer version of ffmpeg to get everything working as I want it to. I found step-by-step instructions to do this. So I'm sitting here, watching gcc commands fly by on the screen while compiling everything and I start thinking, egad, open source has really come a long, long way from my days in the late 90's using Red Hat 6.2 and Ximian desktop. None of the stuff I'm working on would have been possible back then and I really don't want to think about what it would take to do all of this on a proprietary system like Windows.
When I'm done w/ this project and it's fully debugged and in production I plan on writing a series of journal entries about what I've done, the problems I overcame, etc.
Anyway, I just wanted to give a shout out to all the people who make open source possible. I would be a broke, poor soul w/o much of a life if none of this stuff existed, and it's due to the hard work you've all put into it that makes my career possible. Thanks so much!
(Score: 2) by clone141166 on Saturday June 28 2014, @02:14AM
Yep, it's amazing what people can achieve when given the tools and opportunity. Sometimes I wonder if it might be an even more incredible world if biology/chemistry/other scientific equipment was as ubiquitous and accessible as computers and electronics.
(Score: 2) by evilviper on Monday June 30 2014, @06:37AM
ffmpeg is a great example... In the early days of Linux (and BSD) the absolute WORST thing, by far, was video playback. I had nightmares about XAnim. It was the only thing out there, and it was horrid, almost no formats were supported, would commonly play choppy video with no audio (not a performance problem, all software), and in general, you just couldn't do it.
AVIFile then MPlayer saved us... Allowing all the common formats to *usually* work, thansk to wine code loading win32 DLLs, and even allowing reencoding and more. Now, ffmpeg has so many reverse-engineered formats working, and the world has standardized on a few open format rather than an array of RealNetworks, Microsft/ASF/WMA, Quicktime/Sorenson, Intel Cinepak, and dozens of other proprietary options... that those DLL tricks aren't needed and native code does the job.
Browsers and Winmodems and plugins (java, flash, etc) were painful, but nothing was in the same ballpark as the horror of video playback.
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.