Become a sponsor to Vikram Bhaskaran

How my work benefits you 🎯

If you've searched for HLS, DASH, CMAF, per-title encoding, MediaInfo, or restoring noisy audio in Rust, you've probably already benefited from my work. You might have read one of my write-ups on Medium, or dropped revelo, sheathe, viser, or cathar into a pipeline.

I keep things simple — make it work, make it correct, make it fast (in that order). I value byte-identical tests against production oracles over clever abstractions. I run Linux as a daily driver and care about APIs you can actually ship.

Media stack Individual — 25–50 USD / mo and higher

• revelo — a safe, fast MediaInfo replacement. 177+ formats, C ABI + CLI, differential-tested byte-for-byte against the MediaInfo oracle.
• sheathe — pure-Rust CMAF / HLS / DASH packager at parity with Shaka Packager for the features production OTT actually uses, including CENC and multi-DRM.
• viser — content-adaptive bitrate ladders. Per-title, per-shot, per-segment. VMAF, convex hull, BD-Rate — measure, don't guess.
• cathar — restore, enhance, and level audio from any file or video track. Denoise, de-hum, de-click, de-reverb, LUFS. Single static binary, no ffmpeg.
• Priority triage on those crates, plus 50% off a 1:1 working session on encoding, packaging, DRM, or ABR ladders.

How it all started 📖

I've spent nearly two decades in video streaming — connected-TV apps and DRM, then the full stack: live ingest, encoding, MAM, CDN, and VOD. The tools we all depend on — FFmpeg, MediaInfo, Shaka Packager — are extraordinary, and they are C/C++ with the memory and build-system tax that comes with that.

I started rewriting the pieces I actually run in production, in Rust, with oracle tests so the output matches the tools we already trust. revelo came first: a byte-identical MediaInfo. Then sheathe for packaging, viser for ladders, and cathar for audio that needs a second chance.

Open source is how I give that work back. Sponsorship is how I keep enough nights and weekends to maintain it.

So why sponsor?

You're familiar with the 80/20 principle. 80% of people benefitting from this work will keep doing so as a one-way thing. Join the 20% — spur the work on and become part of it.

Technical writing and Open Source have become the craft I protect. They need both investment and support so I can maintain what exists and stay free to start the next crate.

• revelo — read technical and tag metadata from 177+ formats. brew install vbasky/revelo/revelo
• sheathe — MP4 in, CMAF + HLS + DASH out, CENC included. cargo install sheathe
• viser — per-content bitrate ladders from CRF sweeps and VMAF
• cathar — audio restoration and loudness, pure Rust
• somnia — type-safe SurrealDB ORM with Diesel-style migrations
• eligo — generate many images, keep the best
• patina — Rust-native notebook (Rust, Python, JavaScript kernels — no Jupyter)
• dory — keyboard-first database client

You may also be interested in the write-ups:

• Porting 200,000 lines of C to Rust: a byte-identical MediaInfo replacement
• Packaging the world's video in pure Rust
• Measure, don't guess: building viser
• Catharsis for noisy audio
• Somnia: a type-safe ORM for SurrealDB that feels like Diesel