[gst-devel] [gst-cvs] thomasvs gst-ffmpeg: gst-ffmpeg/ gst-ffmpeg/ext/ffmpeg/

[Sebastian Dröge]

On Mi, 2007-02-14 at 14:00 +0100, Thomas Vander Stichele wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-02-14 at 01:48 -0500, Ronald S. Bultje wrote:
> > Hi Edward,
> > 
> > On Feb 14, 2007, at 1:32 AM, Edward Hervey wrote:
> > >  We all now it's a very bad idea and it took us a LONG time before
> > > even allowing it. The conditiong on allowing people building on
> > > external ffmpeg was that we would NOT support those versions (we can
> > > see the difference since the plugin description is different).
> > 
> > Ah, thanks for explaining. I hope you explained how bad an idea it is  
> > given ffmpeg's non-api/abi stability and lack of proper versioning,  
> > in addition to non-api things such as codec behaviour, required  
> > version-specific workarounds and codec wrapping?
> 
> Yep, it was explained to all these distro people, and at the moment
> their decision leans towards using a shared ffmpeg for vlc, mplayer,
> xine and gstreamer.
> 
> AFAIK this is being done in livna (fedora), debian and ubuntu, and
> possibly other distros.

gst-ffmpeg in Ubuntu and Debian is still using the internal ffmpeg copy
because of all the issues mentioned in this thread. For Debian this will
change for next release as Loic explained but for Ubuntu I'm not sure if
just keeping the interal ffmpeg copy and caring for security updates is
less work than handling all bugs that are reported against gst-ffmpeg.

xine/mplayer/vlc are built against the system's ffmpeg though because
their cases are much simlper...

> I have a hunch they will step back when people start complaining that
> none of these versions actually work well, or work well randomly.

I hope that instead the ffmpeg people see the advantage of a stable
API/ABI and do proper releases... well, one can dream ;)

Bye
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