FFmpeg 9.0 Ships as “Lei,” Honoring a Chinese Developer Who Taught a Generation

When it comes to the software tool FFmpeg, technical developers are surely all too familiar with it.

As an open-source and cross-platform multimedia processing toolset, FFmpeg can be called the Swiss Army knife of the audio/video field. It is used extremely widely in the industry and can be said to be an indispensable infrastructure-level software in today's digital media ecosystem.

Just in the past couple of days, FFmpeg's major version 9.0 was officially released.

However, this time the codename for FFmpeg 9.0 is a bit special, having been named "Lei".

And this codename comes precisely from Chinese developer Lei Xiaohua, in memory of this popular science teacher and technology evangelist who led many beginners into the field of audio/video technology.

This year marks exactly the tenth anniversary of Lei Xiaohua's passing.

The FFmpeg community named the major version FFmpeg 9.0 with the codename "Lei" to commemorate this Chinese developer who made many contributions to FFmpeg and the audio/video technology community.

This is both the ultimate romance of the tech community and a profound memorial to this Chinese developer. It is extremely rare in the open-source community and fully demonstrates that Lei Xiaohua's contributions have been widely recognized by the international open-source technology community.

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Lei Xiaohua, with the online handle leixiaohua1020, was a doctoral student in Communication and Information Systems at the Communication University of China, with a research direction in digital video technology.

In 2007, he was admitted to the Communication University of China for his undergraduate studies, and later continued there to pursue his master's and doctoral degrees, focusing on audio/video technology research related to broadcasting and television.

During his school years, he studied diligently and was deeply trusted by his classmates, who affectionately nicknamed him "Lei Xiaohua".

However, regrettably, Lei Xiaohua passed away suddenly in 2016 due to a sudden illness at the young age of 25.

Although his life was short, the technical legacy he left behind still profoundly influences the domestic multimedia technology ecosystem today.

During his student years, he showed extreme passion for low-level audio/video technology. He was most famously known as a top audio/video technology blogger on CSDN.

In the domestic audio/video technology developer community, everyone liked to call him "Thor" (Lei Shen).

In today's AI era, people might not think much of access to technical knowledge materials.

But in that era when Chinese-language audio/video technical materials were relatively scarce and mostly obscure English documents, the hundreds of high-quality technical articles written by Lei Xiaohua were extremely precious.

Their content covered video codec principles, streaming media protocols, and FFmpeg source code analysis and usage examples, and were known for their clear logic and rich illustrations, becoming the introductory enlightenment textbooks for countless domestic audio/video technology learners and engineers.

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As is well known, FFmpeg, as a massive and complex C language project, has sparse source code comments and a multitude of concepts and components, making it not very beginner-friendly.

Before him, learning materials about FFmpeg in the domestic tech community were mostly scattered notes or simple API call examples.

Lei Xiaohua invested a great deal of effort into analyzing and explaining the core modules of FFmpeg (such as libavcodec, libavformat, etc.) in a way that made profound concepts easy to understand.

Especially between 2013 and 2016, Lei Xiaohua wrote a large number of Chinese tutorials and usage examples on FFmpeg API usage, source code analysis, and audio/video encoding/decoding, muxing, and transmission protocols.

His tutorials were known for explaining complex topics in simple terms, skillfully breaking down FFmpeg's complex APIs into the simplest possible examples, complete with full C/C++ example code, allowing beginners to compile and run them directly, understanding FFmpeg's workflow through hands-on practice.

On Lei Xiaohua's technical homepage, it was written:

"I share these works here, hoping they can be of help to beginners in video and audio technology."

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Now, when opening Thor's blog again, the latest content is forever frozen on articles from 2016, and for a moment, one is truly filled with a myriad of emotions.

However, what is deeply moving is that even to this day, many developers and engineers are still paying tribute to Lei Xiaohua in his comment section.

Although Lei Xiaohua's life was short, the technical legacy he left behind has a profound impact, enabling more people to cross language and technical barriers and enter the world of audio/video development.

The current FFmpeg 9.0 major version, named "Lei", is not only a personal memorial to him but also a tribute to all open-source contributors who quietly cultivate and selflessly share knowledge.

Note: This article has been included in the GitHub open-source repository "Road to Programming" https://github.com/rd2coding/Road2Coding, which contains self-study roadmaps + knowledge point summaries for 6 major programming directions (positions), interview points, my resume, several hardcore PDF notes, as well as programmer life and insights. Welcome to star.