FFmpeg vs official decoders question

[PCU]

Is there really a difference between official decoders and FFmpeg, such as file decoding quality: Xiph's official/MainConcept's vs FFmpeg?

[richardpl]

There is big difference in number of security related bugs.

[PCU]

There is big difference in number of security related bugs.

Is that all the difference?

[huhn]

there is also speed and even quality to some very low degree.

for example decoding lossy audio to float instead of integer.
the majority of video codecs and pretty much all new ones are decoded bit perfect.
the last codec that i remember that is not bit perfect when decoded is mpeg2 so the decoder had effect on image quality. else it is just speed or feature level of modern codecs if there is still a difference it is pretty much bug.

there is also error correction for broadcast but that's quite complicated and a matter of who is better at blurring the image.

[FranceBB]

there is also error correction for broadcast but that's quite complicated

Yeah, for instance there's a matter of coping with CRC Errors, wrong frame location / reference line for DolbyE etc, however the overwhelming majority of official decoders for broadcast are hardware decoders and they can be extremely picky about what the source is and about buffer overflows. I find software decoding to be much more resilient than hardware decoding, especially when it comes to buffering fluctuation.

Just a few days ago I had to fight with this for an H.264 file I had to send to a very very picky hardware decoder: https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=184045

[tormento]

Talking about audio, ffmpeg has the habit to decode anything to 16 bits, even when the source is 24 bits.

For FLAC, to be clear, I plainly use the FLAC compressor, in reverse way.

[richardpl]

Learn sometimes to use -c:a pcm_s32le