Dear Josh, On Oct 04 2013, Josh Triplett wrote: > On Fri, Oct 04, 2013 at 09:41:24AM -0300, Rogério Brito wrote: > > I am increasingly unsatisfied with libav and I think that we may need > > to have ffmpeg back in Debian, perhaps having the installation in > > parallel. ffmpeg actually has a bunch of features that libav doesn't > > (support for OpenCL, many filters, like video stabilization, > > concatenation of files from the command line etc.) > > > > It really sucks that we are stuck with libav in Debian. > > I can't argue with that; I have no particular bias for or against libav > in terms of project politics,
Me neither. But, in the interest of full disclosure, I can only say that, some months ago, I dropped by on libav's IRC channel asking about if libav had video stabilization (if you don't know what this is, just check this out and be amazed: http://youtu.be/HYE3KAl8RAQ), since ffmpeg had it for some time. No one responded to that. I waited for some minutes and a person started talking with me (which I assumed was a libav developer) saying that ffmpeg incorporated all the commits/changes in ffmpeg and, therefore, it would be a superset of what libav allowed anyway. I asked him why libav didn't have this, then, and if "transplanting" this feature to libav would be accepted, as I would be willing to both package libvidstab (used by ffmpeg) and the glue code to libav. He answered that he didn't care, because libav, feature-wise was lagging behind ffmpeg and his efforts were in ffmpeg. So, you see it: in libav's IRC channel, no one from libav responded too me. OTOH, an ffmpeg developer was quick to respond to my message. Our chatting became longer and I asked him about an unbiased (as much as possible) version of the *real* story behind the fork and he was prompt to enlighten me with way more substance than what was published everywhere. He was very welcoming and treated me very well and he repeatedly (in fact, so much that I almost told him that I understood the message :) ) told me that I should ask the libav developers for their version of the fact, to avoid having his biased recounting of the whole story. I have, BTW, both filed an ITP bug and packaged libvidstab: http://bugs.debian.org/709193 And submitted patches upstream: https://github.com/georgmartius/vid.stab/graphs/contributors (Can't find my packaging, but, in the worst case, packaging it after my changes were accepted is, now, very easy). > and in terms of technical capability libav doesn't seem capable of keeping > up. Perfectly the situation. > (Why they're not just automatically incorporating every new upstream > changes from ffmpeg I don't know.) According to said ffmpeg developer, ffmpeg incorporates every change from libav, while the converse is not true. And one does not need to trust his words: just see their git tree for all the merges. http://git.videolan.org/?p=ffmpeg.git ffmpeg has a native VP9 decoder (read: "fast"): http://git.videolan.org/?p=ffmpeg.git;a=blob;f=libavcodec/vp9.c;h=0eb92f8c08764c425c08c57393787b5c5d1d3808;hb=HEAD libav doesn't: http://git.libav.org/?p=libav.git;a=tree;f=libavcodec;h=46042d4e2a3f699174f783b5ac11b7d2ca280780;hb=HEAD > At least at the moment, I think it would make sense to upload ffmpeg in > parallel with libav; unless there's some strong technical argument in > favor of libav, we should probably then work towards a transition among > packages that currently build-depend on libav. Would you be interested in helping maintain ffmpeg in Debian with me? > That would also make it easier to solve various other problems, such as > getting mythtv into Debian. Not only that, but XBMC also depends on ffmpeg and, currently, uses an embedded copy of it. And the upcoming version of XBMC reaffirms the use of ffmpeg as well: http://xbmc.org/xbmc-13-gotham-april-and-may-cycles/ https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/blob/master/lib/ffmpeg/Changelog Cheers, -- Rogério Brito : rbrito@{ime.usp.br,gmail.com} : GPG key 4096R/BCFCAAAA http://cynic.cc/blog/ : github.com/rbrito : profiles.google.com/rbrito DebianQA: http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=rbrito%40ime.usp.br -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
