FFmpeg: The Incredible Technology Behind Video on the Internet | Lex Fridman Podcast #496
Jean-Baptiste Kempf & Kieran Kunhya · President of VideoLAN (VLC) & FFmpeg core contributor
Jean-Baptiste Kempf (VLC) and Kieran Kunhya (FFmpeg) take Lex through the invisible plumbing of internet video — what happens between "press play" and "see pixels," why every video codec generation is roughly 30% better and 10–100× more expensive, and why dav1d ships 240,000 hand-written lines of assembly. The conversation also covers the École Centrale origin story of VLC, the Google AI security debacle and Microsoft Teams SLA episode, two intelligence-agency backdoor requests JB refused, a death threat over dropping the PowerPC port, the CIA's Vault 7 fake-VLC build, the codec patent minefield, and JB's new ultra-low-latency project Kyber (4 ms glass-to-glass for remote robotics).
