plan for ffmpeg-devel

[Michael Nottebrock]

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outdated these days.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).

-- 
   ,_,   | Michael Nottebrock               | lofi at freebsd.org
 (/^ ^\) | FreeBSD - The Power to Serve     | http://www.freebsd.org
   \u/   | K Desktop Environment on FreeBSD | http://freebsd.kde.org
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