They are not effectively saying that. The way they talk about the library everywhere else makes it clear that they do expect serious use. Disclaimers in the license don't override that, especially when 99% of software has a disclaimer like that. Those words are there for legal reasons only.
If they wanted to market ffmpeg as a toy project only, not to be trusted, they could do that, but they are not doing that.
Except the very idea that they owe you anything is so absurd that even if they had a contract document stating that they'd do work for you, they still wouldn't have an obligation to do so because society has decided that contracts without some consideration from both sides are not valid. Similarly, even if something you buy comes with a piece of paper saying they don't owe you anything if it breaks, the law generally says that's not true. Because you paid for it.
But they don't say they warrant their work. They have a notice reminding you that you are receiving something for free, and that thing comes with no support, and is not meant to be fit for any particular use you might be thinking of, and that if you want support/help fulfilling some purpose, you can pay someone (maybe even them if you'd like) for that service. Because the way the world works is that as a general principle, other people don't owe you something for nothing. This is not just some legal mumbo jumbo. This is how life works for everyone. It's clear that they're not being malicious (they're not distributing a virus or something), and that's the most you can expect from them.
Computer security is always contextual, but as a general rule, if you're going to be accepting random input from unknown parties, you should have an expert that knows how to do that safely. And as mentioned elsewhere in these comments, such an expert would already be compiling out codecs they don't need and running the processing in a sandboxed environment to mitigate any issues. These days even software written in-house is run in sandboxed environments with minimal permissions when competent professionals are making things. That's just standard practice.
So they should be proud that they support obscure codecs, and by default the onus is on no one to ensure it's free from bugs. If an engineer needs to make a processing pipeline, the onus is always on them to do that correctly. If they want to use a free, unsupported hobby tool as part of their serious engineering project, it's on them to know how to manage any risks involved with that decision. Making good decisions here is literally their job.
All I'm asking for right here is consistency about whether the library is mostly secure. The ethical requirement is to follow through on your claims and implications, while making claims and implications is completely optional.
> Computer security is always contextual, but as a general rule, if you're going to be accepting random input from unknown parties, you should have an expert that knows how to do that safely. And as mentioned elsewhere in these comments, such an expert would already be compiling out codecs they don't need and running the processing in a sandboxed environment to mitigate any issues.
Sandboxing is great defense in depth but most software should not require sandboxing. And expecting everyone to have an expert tweaking compilation is not realistic. Defaults matter, and security expectations need to be established between the site, the documentation, and the defaults, not left as a footgun for only experts to avoid.
The library probably is mostly secure, and it might even be the best library out there for what it does. That still leaves them with no ethical requirement at all.
People are allowed to make secure, robust software for fun. They can take pride in how good of a job they do at that. They can correctly point out that their software is the best. That still leaves them with no obligations at all for having shared their project for free.
If you are not an expert in hardening computers, don't run random untrusted inputs through it, or pay someone to deliver a turnkey hardened system to you. That someone might be Adobe selling their codecs/processing tools, or it might be an individual or a company like Redhat that just customizes ffmpeg for you. In any case, if you're not paying someone, you should be grateful for whatever goodwill you get, and if you don't like it, you can immediately get a full refund. You don't even have to ask.
The person doing serious things in a professional context is always the one with the obligation to do them correctly. When I was at IBM, we used exactly 1 external library (for very early processor initialization) and 1 firmware blob in the product I worked on, and they were paid deliverables from hardware vendors. We also paid for our compiler. Everything else (kernel, drivers, firmware, tools) was in-house. If companies want to use random free code they found on the Internet without any kind of contract in place, that's up to them.
It is if they fix bugs like this. Status quo everything is fine with their actions, they don't need to do anything they aren't already doing.
If they decide they don't want to fix bugs like this, I would say they have the ethical obligation to make it clear that the software is no longer mostly secure. This is quite easy to accomplish. It's not a significant burden in any way.
Basically, if they want to go the less-secure route, I want it to be true that they're "effectively saying" that all caps text you wrote earlier. That's all. A two minute edit to their front page would be enough. They could edit the text that currently says "A complete, cross-platform solution to record, convert and stream audio and video." I'll even personally commit $10 to pay for those two minutes of labor, if they decide to go that route.
If they wanted to market ffmpeg as a toy project only, not to be trusted, they could do that, but they are not doing that.