post about the ffmpeg / libav split

[Jonathan Hartley]

I was interested to read this background on ffmpeg & libav.

http://blog.pkh.me/p/13-the-ffmpeg-libav-situation.html

I don't know whether this is an unbiased or authoritative account, but
it was still interesting to me just to find out about the split & its
contentiousness.

Cheers,

Jonathan

[Nathan]

If you read that, read the opposing point of view that he links to as well:

http://codecs.multimedia.cx/?p=370

You can basically sum everything up as "one big mess" in my opinion.
There's talented coders on both sides -- too bad they didn't find a
way to keep the project together. Strong coding skills seem to often
have an inverse relationship with strong social skills, unfortunately.

For AVbin 9 and 10 we're going to try Libav. Whether or not we decide
to support FFmpeg as well or instead in the future just depends on how
things work out. It makes my life harder, unfortunately, since
there's not a clear leading project that I can commit to tracking
long-term. Because of the limited scope of AVbin (just
decoding/demuxing using a few API calls) we *might* be able to
maintain support for both.

~ Nathan

[anatoly techtonik]

There should be a conflict point somewhere, a conflict of interest. Let me turn on a paranoid bit. If I am not mistaken ffmpeg and libav are both C/C++. C/C++ is exploitable. I somebody is looking into a way to exploit many systems to add them to botnet or steal private keys secretly (which is more interesting nowadays)  -  attacking ffmpeg is a valid choice IMHO. Now avbin == Debian/Ubuntu, ffmpeg == everything else. What I am trying to say? Somebody should start writing non-GPL audio/video decompressors in pure Python and companies should invest in PyPy to make it beat those ancient technologies. Then the Earth will be safe again. =)

Of course looking how codec processes one frame in n seconds could be boring, but what if the whole decoding process can be visualized with pyglet? I'd be interesting to see how video structure look like from inside and play with it instead of drilling through specifications and headers..

[Nathan]

I would love to see your visualization of the decoding process, if you
ever develop it. :-)

~ Nathan

[Jonathan Hartley]

Thanks for the further reading Nathan.