[gst-devel] FFmpeg

[Ronald Bultje]

On Wed, 2003-12-24 at 14:18, Mathrick wrote:
[..]
> apparently not everyone is after it. I can't really see the reason for
> not doing that, so please, if you have some very good rationale for
> leaving ffmpeg in gst-plugins to continue trashing it, share with us.
> Otherwise, no vote against counts as vote for it :).

I'm starting to get so horribly fed up with people saying "hey, this
doesn't work correctly" and then they go redo the whole stuff.

___IT___ ___DOES___ ___NOT___ ___WORK___!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Was I clear? We say we have an issue with ffmpeg. So let's just fix it!
Now, back to normal mood for me:

If ffmpeg didn't check-out correctly, then the first thing to do is to
check your network and everything else - I've *never* had issues with
it. Then, 'make checkout' in gst-libs/ext/ffmpeg/, edit ext/Makefile:

#FFMPEG_DIR = ffmpeg
FFMPEG_DIR =

becomes

FFMPEG_DIR = ffmpeg
#FFMPEG_DIR =

And you're ready to go. No re-configure needed. You say this is not for
end users? End users don't compile, end users don't use CVS.

Now, over to the Gnome (dev.) people. The main reason seems to be that
some Gnome people have sucky network connections, too. The problem is
not that ffmpeg doesn't checkout, but that ffmpeg checks out only half.
For that, we can simply adapt the .m4 macro to check the return value of
the 'cvs' command - it will be !0 when failed. Done. I'd suggest them to
check their network connections too. Or if it really is ffmpeg's server
vorking (unlikely, since it always works for me), I'd suggest asking
them to do something about it.

Moving ffmpeg out of gst-plugins only makes things worse since ffmpeg is
extremely important for us. We *depend* on ffmpeg badly. And that's not
a bad thing. Mplayer does so too, and so does Xine. And any other decent
media player or framework on Linux/Unix. The ffmpeg people have a great
collection of opensource codecs. This *needs* to be part of our main
gst-plugins tarball. And I want to be able to update it with one single
'make checkout' and (sometimes) a small addition (to _SOURCES) in
Makefile.am.

Given that I maintain the ffmpeg plugins I'd like a vote in this too. I
**like** how it works now. Don't break it. Don't. Just don't.

And general: let's stop redoing things, guys. Instead, let's fix things.
We want to be ready for Gnome-2.6 in March. And we're not. We're far
from it. Let's start fixing *that*. I want gst-player to play the movies
I throw at it. I want rhythmbox to actually do metadata editing and to
play back my broken mp3s that I ripped using sound-juicer (created with
our lame plugin, which no doubt broke too at some point). I'll help the
beep people porting it to GStreamer. I want to record movies with
gst-rec. I want to transcode, edit, everything. With current HEAD/CVS,
none of this works. I don't want to fix ffcolorspace again tomorrow.
Let's fix this first.

Ronald

-- 
Ronald Bultje <rbultje at ronald.bitfreak.net>
Linux Video/Multimedia developer