Every Video on Earth Runs Through His Code. He Chose Poverty. Google Sent AI Bugs.
Its creator left in 2003. One developer chose minimum income for 11 years to keep it running. Google sent bugs, not money.
Billions of video streams a day.
One man living on a minimum income in Vienna.
Every video you watched today, on YouTube, Netflix, TikTok, and the clip your friend sent on WhatsApp, went through software called FFmpeg. The person who created it left twenty-three years ago to build something else. The person who kept it alive for the next decade deliberately chose poverty to do it.
And Google, which uses FFmpeg in Chrome and YouTube, which made over $400 billion in revenue in 2025, recently sent FFmpeg an AI-generated list of security bugs. No patches. No money. Just a 90-day countdown to fix them.
This is the story of Fabrice Bellard, who might be the most productive programmer alive and who walked away. Of Michael Niedermayer, who gave up everything to carry what Bellard left behind. And of an industry that watched him do it for free.
I have been in tech for over twenty years. I worked in media, specifically video streaming. I know what unfunded dependencies look like in production.
This story is not unique. But the scale of it should make you angry.
