On 28/06/2012 01:22, Andy Bircumshaw wrote:
On 27 June 2012, at 20:57, dinkypumpkin wrote:
On 27/06/2012 19:08, Andy Bircumshaw wrote:
Gentoo now has a package virtual/ffmpeg which is fulfilled by either
media-video/ffmpeg or media-video/libav.
Thanks for that. Since we gratefully junked Gentoo at work I haven't paid much
attention to it and it's clear I'm behind the times. I have to give them a lot
of credit for trying to bridge the divide, but that seems like a heck of a lot
of work for a little bit of user choice.
On Gentoo, it's actually pretty trivial to add the virtual.
I was thinking more of the work required on the Gentoo side to police
ABI/API compatibility, validate dependencies, check patches, etc. But
then Gentoo is in a different niche. All the other distros that
provides binary packages would have to pick one fork or the other for
sanity's sake.
There's a little work to ensure that packages now depend on the virtual,
instead of the previous media-video/ffmpeg package. And of course compatibility
may start to become a problem in the future - then they may need to stop
depending on the virtual again and instead directly upon ffmpeg or libav
respectively. I imagine that media-video/ffmpeg and media-video/libav now
block each other.
But for it's stuff like this that I use Gentoo - I want to be able to make the
choice for myself.
From the perspective of get_iplayer, I hope Libav vs. FFmpeg remains a
distinction without a difference for a long time to come. Fortunately,
get_iplayer only has to worry about ABI/API breakage indirectly via its
dependencies.
Since each fork can always take code from the other, it's difficult to
see how either one will present a compelling advantage to the average
joe who just wants to convert a few files in the more popular formats.
Users with more specialised needs may have a reason to pick one or the
other for certain codecs, but I hope the BBC never forces get_iplayer
into that category.
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