Meta describes how they scaled FFmpeg to process over 1 billion daily video uploads and deprecated their internal fork by upstreaming key features.
- •Meta executes FFmpeg and FFprobe tens of billions of times per day for video transcoding and media processing
- •They maintained an internal FFmpeg fork for years to support threaded multi-lane encoding and real-time quality metrics
- •Multi-lane transcoding decodes video once and distributes frames to multiple encoders; parallel encoding support landed in FFmpeg 6.0–8.0
- •Real-time quality metrics via in-loop decoding were enabled in FFmpeg 7.0, allowing per-frame PSNR/SSIM/VMAF computation during live transcoding
- •Custom MSVP ASIC support was integrated through FFmpeg's standard hardware API, while infrastructure-specific patches remain internal
Engineering at Meta