Niklas Haas
Independent Consultant at Self-employed
Ulm, Baden-Württemberg, Germany
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top School
Top expert inCross-Platform Media and Privacy Tools Development
Niklas Haas is an independent consultant and multimedia systems engineer with over a decade of hands-on experience optimizing video pipelines and integrating advanced rendering features. He has led development of libplacebo and contributed core improvements to VLC, mpv and FFmpeg, focusing on HDR tone mapping, color management, Dolby Vision metadata, and OpenGL/Vulkan integrations. As a frequent open-source contributor he’s extended Haskell’s lens library and improved qutebrowser’s UI hinting, showing fluency across languages from Rust/C to Haskell and Python. Known for pragmatic performance work, he balances low-level graphics engineering with practical UX improvements and robust testing (doctests, imports, generalized functions). Based in Ulm, Germany, he combines academic rigor from a strong CS background with consulting-driven delivery for clients needing measurable multimedia performance gains. An understated detail: he routinely bridges cutting-edge graphics research and production players, turning experimental tone-mapping algorithms into shipping features.
12 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Science, Very Good (1), Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Science, Very Good (1) at Ulm University
English, German, Norwegian, Russian
Github Skills (33)
shader10
qt10
python10
compiler-development10
browser10
c-programming10
c1110
c1710
pyqt10
typeset10
qutebrowser10
lenses10
graphics-programming10
ghc10
functional-programming10
Programming languages (30)
Github contributions (5)
mpv-player/mpv
Feb 2014 - Jan 2023
🎥 Command line media player
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:170 reviews, 654 commits, 358 PRs in 9 years
Contributions summary:Niklas primarily worked on optimizing the rendering pipeline of the mpv media player. Their contributions focused on improving the handling of image and video processing in the OpenGL video output driver, including rewriting the tone mapping algorithm, implementing support for a new tone mapping algorithm, and adding HDR peak detection. They addressed several bugs related to color management and rendering.
mpvlibavplayeraudiovideo-player
videolan/vlc
Feb 2018 - Dec 2022
VLC media player - All pull requests are ignored, please use MRs on https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:141 commits in 4 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Niklas primarily contributed to the video output module, focusing on enhancing the VLC media player's OpenGL capabilities. They added support for the libplacebo library, specifically addressing color space conversions, HDR tone mapping, and integrating custom shaders. The user implemented support for Dolby Vision metadata and added the ability to load custom LUTs.
gplv2libvlcfollowframeworkvlc
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