Hi, On Sun, Apr 10, 2016 at 10:13 PM, Michael Niedermayer <mich...@niedermayer.cc> wrote: > This is not about changing a bad encoder to a good encoder, this patch > is about removing choices. > Before this patch users can force libfaac and have twice as long > battery life at lower quality after the patch the users do not have > that choice anymore > > I do not think thats a good idea nor in the interrest of our users
I have thought about this somewhat, and the things boil down to: * Libfaac is old, unmaintained, produces relatively bad quality and requires a "nonfree" configuration, which disables any sort of binary distribution. Last point probably being the most problematic for anyone who wants to use it outside of a server context. In which case there's already fdk-aac available, which has found immense popularity during the last few years before the internal encoder became better. Fdk-aac still serves a purpose with HE-AAC, as well as some specific LC-AAC use cases (latter according to some random people on #ffmpeg ), so it yet isn't considered something worth removing. * Both are very fast (about 30x realtime vs 60x realtime as far as could be gathered by the numbers posted on this thread if I am reading them correctly). Even if you are doing live recording, neither of these is likely to be slow enough for the CPU usage to really matter. * The faac encoder will still be there for those who really want to still use it, albeit no longer through libavcodec. This can actually ease usage for some people as they can now compile libavcodec without enable-nonfree and instead handle the licensing incompatibility on their side in one way or another (except it's supposedly licensed as GPL while parts of its source code are suposedly GPL-incompatible, thus pretty much making that case not really true, unlike fdk-aac which doesn't seem to have such contradictions within its own code base). * Keeping this encoder available will serve as an endorsement for it. Do we really want to endorse this encoder? Additionally, as a minor not-really-related anecdote, I have only seen people on #ffmpeg having -c:a/-acodec libfaac on their command lines when they have followed very old tutorials from up to just before fdk-aac got published. They assume it's what they want to use due to quality (which at this point is no longer true), and it used to be distributed in various distributions linked to libavcodec - which is no longer true in many distributions, such as Ubuntu. In any case, I think my opinion on this boils to this component not really being in any way good enough that we should keep this alternative around, including but not limited to its license situation. Old versions will keep having it, and if someone knowingly wants to use it specifically through libavcodec, they can still do so. Otherwise, they can stick it into their media workflow in other ways, as I noted. I do try to understand the wish to keep choices available to users, but in this case I am not sure if it brings in anything else but confusion. Best regards, Jan Ekström _______________________________________________ ffmpeg-devel mailing list ffmpeg-devel@ffmpeg.org http://ffmpeg.org/mailman/listinfo/ffmpeg-devel
