Well, make no mistake, the large ones use ffmpeg too ;) The secret is in the flags.

What glitches are there in ffmpeg? The problem here is a resource imbalance inherent in the difference between proprietary big tech platforms and often individual self-hosted software. While some of these self-hostable software are of high quality, these will never match the resources that Google or Facebook has. They can't afford to fix every issue in existence, because they are often volunteer projects making little to no money. Techy people understands this tradeoff, and proceeds with open source tools, because they are aware the situation that proprietary platforms can put them in and they would like to avoid it.

The glitch isn’t in ffmpeg, it’s in the receiving phone since you sent them a format which isn’t supported by that phone’s hardware decoder. The trick of youtube isn’t just a quick upload, it’s the auto transcoding to formats for anything that requests it over any arbitrary link speed.

Yep. And if the opensource world wanted to match that functionality, you would want ffmpeg to have an option to output all common formats, packaged together in a mega-file.

Then, when a user wants to watch a video, they could use HTTP range requests to download just the data they want to view from the megafile, in the format they need. If, midway through watching, their internet gets a bit slow, the browser could auto-switch to a different lower-res format. The megafile would have the necessary indexes etc to know which timestamps of which audio and video feeds are at which byte locations, and where keyframes are for easy switching.

Things like youtube have proprietary code to do this. But the opensource world doesn't have much comparable - at least nothing widely deployed to be able to just send a video to a friend, and know that whatever device and internet connection they have, they'll have a good experience.

> This struck me... Us techy people should be able to use our knowledge to get more out of our tech setups.

You are going up against a probably 1000s strong team of equally techy people whose job it is to do what you are trying to cobble together. Unless there is a niche use case that you are trying to workaround, it is hard to solve a mainstream problem that isn't solved better by one of the Big Corps.

I was thinking about this. It would be great to have easy plug and play server services.

It would probably end up a mess like Wordpress plug-ins. But Wordpress works and it easyish for non technical people to set up..

Why wouldn’t you be falling behind? YouTube has tens of thousands of full time hackers. It’s the height of silliness to imagine that some disorganized hobbyists can match the experience.