1. The famous FFmpeg X

When it comes to social media buzz, this year clearly belonged to FFmpeg and the person running their X account. Their most viral post hit over 2 million views and directly called out Theo, a popular tech YouTuber, after he criticized FFmpeg’s codec implementation in VLC. Theo’s original post has since been deleted, but the story had a good ending: he ended up donating $5k to support FFmpeg’s ongoing development.

But that wasn’t a one-off moment. A series of FFmpeg posts (example here, here, and here) kicked off a much wider (and long-overdue) conversation that quickly spread beyond X. As an example, one of the threads focused on Google’s security requirements for FFmpeg – expectations were being set, but no funding was offered in return (you can read more here). It put a spotlight on a familiar problem: open-source projects power a huge chunk of modern tech, yet many of them are still scraping by with little to no financial support.

But FFmpeg's X was not discovered in 2025.

As a little bonus, here's the hall of fame of our all-time favorite replies:

2. VLC shows offline AI subtitles & translation at CES2025

While 2025 in socials belonged largely to FFmpeg, there was more interesting stuff happening. The year started with VLC’s show-off of automatic subtitle generation and translation. The whole thing was based on open source AI models, running offline and supporting numerous languages, which was very impressive!

3. OBS Studio 31.1.0 Beta with the Exit button removed

Another interesting social media announcement was done by the OBS team, sharing an announcement of the OBS Studio 31.1.0 Beta release, and, at the same time, letting people know that they’ve removed the Exit button to “encourage testing”. In this example, the comment section speaks for itself.

4. FFmpeg merges WebRTC support

Another interesting discussion happened around FFmpeg’s announcement of WebRTC support. The post highlighted a major step toward making low-cost, open-source live streaming feasible, with users debating bandwidth, P2P possibilities, and infrastructure limits. The comment section quickly turned into a deep technical discussion, showing both excitement for the milestone and curiosity about real-world performance.

We hope you enjoy the RTC.ON newsletter as much as we do. It's great to see all of you joining us each month for a little multimedia walk through – thanks!

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