Ridley Combs
Senior Software Engineer at Discord
United States
Summary
🤩
RockstarRidley Combs is a Senior Systems Software Engineer with 12 years of experience building high-performance media and networking software across x86 and ARM platforms. He has driven media handling and playback architecture at Plex and implemented core AV capture and call functionality at Discord, and now works on systems software at NVIDIA. Ridley combines deep C/C++ and libc-level expertise with practical knowledge of ffmpeg, subtitle rendering (notably contributions to mpv and libass), and cross-platform network/TLS API tuning. His open-source work includes improving mpv subtitle/track selection, enhancing libass rendering and caching, and hardening libcurl’s multi-handle socket behavior on Windows and Apple platforms. Colleagues rely on him for reverse engineering tricky media formats and for pragmatic performance optimizations that reduce crashes and memory issues. He pairs low-level systems skill with product-focused judgment, often surfacing subtle platform bugs and usability wins that aren’t obvious from outside the code.
12 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Github Skills (17)
caching10
ffmpeg10
c1110
libcurl10
mpv10
render10
networking10
decoding10
c1710
substr10
font-rendering10
subtitle10
data-structures8
data-structure8
appleii8
Programming languages (21)
Github contributions (5)
libass/libass
Dec 2013 - Nov 2022
libass is a portable subtitle renderer for the ASS/SSA (Advanced Substation Alpha/Substation Alpha) subtitle format.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:287 reviews, 185 commits, 85 PRs in 9 years
Contributions summary:Ridley primarily focused on improving the subtitle rendering process within the libass library. Their contributions include adding a font index magic function to correct character indexes for specific font encodings, and optimizing the caching system. Additionally, the user implemented various performance optimizations by simplifying hash functions and fixing memory allocation issues. Further work included improving rendering functionality, by reorganizing the bitmap processing steps.
asssubstation-alphasubtitle-formatssubstationsubtitle-format
mpv-player/mpv
Feb 2020 - Dec 2022
🎥 Command line video player
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:80 reviews, 15 commits, 54 PRs in 2 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Ridley primarily contributed to the core functionality of the mpv media player, focusing on subtitle handling and track selection. Their commits introduced new options for subtitle display behavior, including forced-only subtitle rendering, and refactored the logic for choosing default audio and subtitle tracks. They also improved program ID and HLS bitrate reporting. Additionally, they addressed a crash related to macOS and added support for ARIB captions.
mpvlibavplayeraudiovideo-player
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