I was under the impression (though I may be wrong) most standard video types are converted by some in-house closed source software developed by Google, but then if it's an odd/obscure format their software can't process they fall back on FFMPEG.
Even if they do use FFMPEG I'd guess it's heavily modified to suit their needs/infastructure
Why would google want to reengineer and build closed sourced video converters? Especially when you need to pay multimillion dollar licensing fees to mpegla et al to even try to do such a thing.
If you touch a patented codec (in a country where software patents apply), you need to pay for patent license regardless whether you wrote the code yourself or not. Google must be paying for H.264 encoding already.
> Why would google want to reengineer and build closed sourced video converters?
To adapt them for their infrastructure and trade-offs. They are transcoding a lot of video. Zencoder for example modified their transcoders to encode multiple formats from a single decoded stream (I presume with ffmpeg you'd end up decoding same video multiple time during transcode into multiple formats).
I think you can use ffmpeg to decode to a buffer (memory or disk as needed), and the re-encode from that buffer into various sizes/formats. don't think you actually need a different encoder/decoder to do that. I may be horribly wrong though :)
