[gst-devel] ffmpeg troubles

[Benjamin Otte]

Quoting Ronald Bultje <rbultje at ronald.bitfreak.net>:

> (And I still don't like this gst-ffmpeg thing as a long-term solution.)
> 
I'm actually very happy that gst-plugin's ext/ dir is empty now. The main 
problems with the "we pull everything and then use it" approach is quite 
tricky, not only for build reasons.
There's quite some issues linking stuff because of symbol clashes with pulled 
libraries, too. ffmpeg is the worst offender here. (Examples are Xine and 
musicbrianz. It doesn't help to export a function called "mp3_init" either. IT 
should be named "ff_mp3_init")

I'd be more than happy to include the ffmpeg plugin code in gst-plugins again 
btw, whenever those depend on a release library.
The only tricky part is the "released library" part. There's many 
possibilities:
1) ffmpeg gets releases done. This is somehow very unlikely.
2) Someone forks ffmpeg and gets releases done. This is my favourite. 
Unfortunately it requires smacking a lot of people who don't see the need 
right now. (Who would link two ffmpeg using libs anyway?)
3) Everyone forks ffmpeg and releases it somehow. That's what we have now. And 
it just sucks as we wittness again and again.

The ffmpeg guys are great reverse engineers and "doing my stuff" people. They 
just suck at infrastructure...

Benjamin