> See, unlike many people I don’t regard FFmpeg as something unique (in the sense that it’s a project only Fabrice Bellard could create). It was nice to have around and it helped immeasurably but without it something else would fill the niche.

This comes off as highly insulting. "something else would fill the niche", do you really know that? and even if its true, you could probably say that same thing about any other landmark software, making the statement meaningless in addition to being rude.

I am inclined to give Konstantin leeway, as he was an FFmpeg developer, but even being in that position, I dont think he has any right to make a statement like this.

Personally, I see elevating Fabrice Bellard to this godlike figure that nobody else can possibly touch as insulting to the whole rest of the multimedia community who helped maintain ffmpeg. Fabrice didn't touch ffmpeg past the first couple of years, and its infamy and usefulness started long after Fabrice stopped working on it.

Fabrice is extremely smart and talented. But there are plenty of unsung heroes in the multimedia work that should also get plenty of recognition, too.

At its core, ffmpeg is pretty much an audiovisual codec Swiss army knife. And that kind of Swiss army knife approach to a diverse-format landscape tends to arise pretty spontaneously. ImageMagick, for example, covers the same ground for image formats. Or disassemblers, where virtually every project ends up in the land of disassemble-all-the-architectures-in-all-the-object-formats pretty damn quick.

What's unusual about ffmpeg is its lack of a real competitor.

It's the same situation as with Linux. The idea behind it is not unique. Nor is the idea behind FFmpeg. And a motivated developer could start either of these projects. What is unique is that the projects persisted, they attracted other developers and became a place where many people coopeate to create something truly unique. It's not worth working on FFmpeg competitor at this point.