VLC supports iOS 9 through iOS 26
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Snapshot · Lex Fridman Podcast
#496 – FFmpeg: The Incredible Technology Behind Video on the Internet
Explore episode
May 6, 2026
Where this was said
Reverse engineering codecs
At 2:01:02 · chapter starts 1:48:59
Kostya's GoToMeeting reverse engineering, stepping through millions of CPU instructions, dumping memory from VMs, needing bit-exact output — and why a 1MB blob takes a month. [1] — Kieran Kunhya "Reverse engineering a codec means opening a binary with no documentation, stepping through millions of CPU instructions in a debugger, dump…" 2:00:00
62x faster than C
Hand-written SIMD assembly for pixel format conversion functions in Kieran's company runs 62 times faster than equivalent C code.
Why Hand-Written Assembly Beats C by 62x
Compilers cannot auto-vectorize anywhere close to what an expert human can do by hand. The dav1d AV1 decoder proves it: 80% assembly, 62x faster than C on pixel conversion functions, running on 3 billion devices. Moore's Law is over — squeezing hardware through hand-crafted assembly is how you get more without buying more.
AV1 saves 40–60% bandwidth vs H.264
AV1 achieves 40–60% bandwidth reduction compared to H.264 at the same visual quality, enabling better streaming at lower bitrates.
Reverse Engineering a Codec From a Binary Blob
Reverse engineering a codec means opening a binary with no documentation, stepping through millions of CPU instructions in a debugger, dumping memory from a virtual machine, and slowly inferring — frame by frame — what the compression algorithm is doing. A 1MB blob takes roughly a month. Kostya did 20–30MB blobs regularly, for fun.
The FFmpeg Testing Matrix Is Insane
FFmpeg's FATE testing system runs on volunteer hardware across hundreds of compiler, OS, and CPU variants — from Visual Studio to Apple Clang, from x86 to RISC-V to PowerPC. A single code change can silently miscompile on GCC 11 on macOS. The matrix of combinations isn't a table — it's a pivot table.
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