Meta processes FFmpeg binaries tens of billions of times daily across its platforms, enabling video uploads, transcoding, and quality improvements for billions of users. The company historically relied on an internal FFmpeg fork to handle multi-lane encoding and real-time quality metrics, but this created maintenance challenges as the fork diverged from upstream development.

Over years, Meta collaborated with FFmpeg developers, FFlabs, and VideoLAN to upstream critical features. Threaded multi-lane encoding arrived in FFmpeg 6.0 and 8.0, while real-time quality metrics through in-loop decoding became available in FFmpeg 7.0. These contributions allowed Meta to fully deprecate its internal fork for both VOD and livestreaming pipelines.

Meta's migration demonstrates how large-scale infrastructure can benefit from open-source collaboration. The company upstreamed features with broad community impact while keeping Meta-specific patches internal, such as support for the Meta Scalable Video Processor ASIC. This approach balances contributing to the FFmpeg ecosystem while maintaining competitive advantages where appropriate.