Updating multimedia/handbrake

[Jonathan]

I have some general questions/issues about updating and maintaining the
multimedia/handbrake port.

1) The handbrake build system unmodified uses wget to download all it's
dependencies itself.  The patches to modify the build system to not do
this are fairly significant and are a maintenance headache.  Would
allowing the port to download it's dependencies itself be acceptable or
do I need to continue using the ports distfile system and maintaining
awkward patches?

2) In addition to the above the developers have stated they would
strongly prefer that we not download the dependencies directly from them
as the server is not load balanced.  In this case do we fetch them
directly anyway, host them on FreeBSD controlled systems, or something
else altogether?

3) The Handbrake developers prefer to directly distribute binaries
rather than have people building handbrake themselves but this goes
again the ports philosophy where building from source is the primary
method and packages are a convenience.  Should I make the port a stub
that installs a pre-compiled binary like the teamspeak port does?

As I write this email it seems 3 may be the most acceptable solution for
both sides.  Anyone see any significant downsides to this other than the
need to possibly have separate packages for 6 and 7?

Thank you for your time,
Jonathan Stewart