The video software with a made-up author, and the volunteers who keep it running

On 20 December 2000 a new piece of free software appeared, with a short note at the top of its instructions file: "FFmpeg version 0.9 - (c) 2000 Gerard Lantau." It called itself "a hyper fast realtime audio/video encoder and streaming server."

There was no Gerard Lantau. The name was a cover for Fabrice Bellard, the programmer who had started the project. For a year and a half the copyright line in its code said "Gerard Lantau". Then, on the night of 25 May 2002, a run of changes titled "license/copyright change" replaced that name with his own.

On his website Bellard writes: "I launched this project in year 2000 and led it for several years." Why he used a false name is not on record. Some write-ups suggest he feared patent lawsuits, but we have found no statement from Bellard saying so.

The software you have already used today

FFmpeg converts video and sound from one format to another, so a file recorded on one device can play on another. The project describes it as able to handle "pretty much anything that humans and machines have created".

It sits inside software you probably have open now. The source code of Google Chrome includes FFmpeg. Firefox includes files "from FFmpeg". The VLC media player uses FFmpeg's video library to play files. Meta wrote in March 2026 that it runs FFmpeg "tens of billions of times a day". NASA's Perseverance rover used it too: the team behind the rover's landing cameras wrote that their core video processing and compression engine "is powered by FFMPEG".

YouTube and Netflix reportedly rely on it too, though neither company has said so in a statement we could find.

The man behind the made-up name built much more

Bellard's website lists a long run of other projects: QEMU, a program that lets one computer pretend to be another; a tiny compiler that could build and start Linux in under 15 seconds; and, in 2009, a world record for calculating pi, about 2,700 billion digits on a single desktop computer.

The developer with the most changes to FFmpeg on record is Michael Niedermayer, who first appears in January 2002 and was still making changes in September 2026. When he stepped down as leader in 2015, the project said it would be run by its active contributors.

Big companies, volunteer code

The project says it is written "almost exclusively by volunteers". Some of its developers are paid by companies.

On 11 May 2023 a Microsoft engineer wrote on FFmpeg's public bug tracker, the website where anyone can report a problem: "This is a high priority ticket and the FFmpeg version is currently used in a highly visible product in Microsoft. We have customers experience issues with Caption during Teams Live Event." About an hour later a volunteer replied. A setting had changed between versions, and the answer was to switch it back. The engineer wrote: "Thank you so much for the help!"

The story became public in 2024. Kieran Kunhya, a long-time FFmpeg developer and the person behind the project's account on X, answered a Reuters reporter in his own capacity, not for anyone else at FFmpeg. "Microsoft did not pay for any fix," he wrote. "There was no actual fix." He said a company with several FFmpeg developers on its payroll had asked Microsoft for a support contract, and Microsoft replied that a few thousand dollars was potentially available. "This amount is too small to support any developer or maintenance." We found no public statement from Microsoft.

In 2025 a similar row involved Google. Its AI bug-hunting tool reported security flaws in FFmpeg, and FFmpeg's X account asked whether it was fair for "trillion-dollar corporations" to find issues "in people's hobby code" and "expect volunteers to fix". Those posts were not a decision of the whole project, and not everyone at FFmpeg agreed. Niedermayer, who says he is "the main developer fixing security issues in FFmpeg", wrote that "Google has been the most helpful & nice" of all companies. In 2026 Kunhya and Jean-Baptiste Kempf, president of VideoLAN, the group behind the VLC player, said Google had since made changes and is "now starting to send patches", meaning fixes as well as reports.

Germany became its first government sponsor

In May 2024 Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund became FFmpeg's first government sponsor, with €157,580 across 2024 and 2025. FFmpeg later said its count of known code defects was the lowest since 2016, and credited the grant. Donations go through Software in the Public Interest, a US non-profit.

Ask your vendor who fixes what you bought

FFmpeg says that because so much of its code handles files from outside, "security issues are unavoidable", so it puts out quick updates. That only helps if the product you bought takes them.

We do not know whether any particular Malaysian product uses FFmpeg. If your website, CCTV or e-learning system handles video, ask your vendor three questions. Which open-source parts does it use? Which versions, and how fast do you apply their security fixes? If something breaks inside one of them, who fixes it?