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6 May 2026 Lex Fridman Podcast #496 – FFmpeg: The Incredible Technology Behind Video on the Internet

“We should emphasize in the 2000s it was really normal to download a program and it secretly installs some spyware. It was, it was buried in very faint text or in the license text box that nobody reads at the bottom- … “Oh, I will be installing this toolbar- … and changing all these things,” and it was very common to have to, you know, you install a program to do something at the time of any sort.”

— Speaker unverified

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Speaker
Speaker unverified
Attribution
Not verified from this transcript
Claim type
commitment
Recorded
6 May 2026
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

Transcript context

…Yeah, well, I should say me and most of the internet thank you for that decision. It’s inspiring for others I think that are pushing the open source movement forward, that it’s okay to do these kinds of huge sacrifices if you believe it’s right. And I think in that case it was right and it was the reason that VLC became as successful as it was, ’cause it’s an embodiment, it’s a symbol of like, you know, freedom and what the open source community can create. Yeah, and be a service for so many people around the world, and this is important. We should emphasize in the 2000s it was really normal to download a program and it secretly installs some spyware. It was, it was buried in very faint text or in the license text box that nobody reads at the bottom- … “Oh, I will be installing this toolbar- … and changing all these things,” and it was very common to have to, you know, you install a program to do something at the time of any sort. To put yourself in the mind of a developer at that time, I think it’s very easy—to everybody listening to this, it’s very easy at that time to convince yourself to take a few thousand dollars- … a few thousand dollars to do it. To say no to much more money- … takes guts and takes vision.…

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