plan for ffmpeg-devel

[Andrew Pantyukhin]

On 4/3/07, Michael Nottebrock <lofi at freebsd.org> wrote:
> On Monday, 2. April 2007, Torfinn Ingolfsen wrote:
> > On Mon, 02 Apr 2007 11:37:32 -0400
> >
> > Michael Johnson <ahze at freebsd.org> wrote:
> > > I want to move ffmpeg-devel -> ffmpeg and we need testers.
> > > not just to make sure things build but to assure movies play,
> > > mp3's still play, etc... Please test new ffmpeg-devel
> >
> > AFAICT, I'm not an active user of ffmpeg-devel or ffmpeg. I see that it
> > is installed on a couple of my FreeBSD machines (probably as a
> > requirement for something else that I have installed).
> >
> > It looks to me like ffmpeg is for video format conversion, and that it
> > is not a video player program. Is this correct?
>
> Only at first glance - ffmpeg provides the libavformat, libpostprocess and
> libavcodec libraries, which provide container parsing, image enhancement and
> encoding/decoding, respectively, and which are, and I'm not exagerating here,
> the de-facto backend of *every* established open source multimedia software,
> be it mplayer, vlc, transcode, xine ... take away ffmpeg from any of those,
> and you get approximately the format support of an out-of-the-box Windows 95.
>
> However, since ffmpeg isn't a project that does proper code releases, most
> other projects maintain the ffmpeg sources in their own repositories and ship
> them in their release tarballs (which is somewhat unfortunate).
>
> Like Michael says, vlc is a good test candidate, since it dynamically links to
> ffmpeg(-devel) as in ports. Transcode is another.
>
> But I think we should consider updating the ffmpeg-devel to a more recent
> snapshot before doing the move, as even the ffmpeg-devel port is rather
> outdated these days. Or even better, update ffmpeg to a snapshot that is
> widely used elsewhere (read: popular Linux distributions) and keep
> ffmpeg-devel around and put the latter on an aggressive update schedule (once
> a month).

BTW, it would be extremely cool if we could get mplayer
use ffmpeg from ports.

Newer snapshots of ffmpeg are not just newer, they are
required by contemporary software (e.g. veejay is in
my queue).