Package ffmpeg with gem?

[genericrich]

Hell all,

I'm a Ruby guy with some experience with ffmpeg (built a transcoding
service with Ruby, ffmpeg, and XGrid), and have been thinking of a
project like this for awhile. Great work so far!

The real pain of using ffmpeg is installing it. Do you think it would
be useful to just package the binary in the gem? You'd have to have
one for mac, one for linux (various flavors, maybe), but it would be
nice to come up with a canonical build of ffmpeg to redistribute.

I would be happy to try and help out!

[Jon Dahl]

Building ffmpeg/etc is definitely a pain. Two concerns with providing
precompiled binaries, though:

First, GPL licensing issues. You can do it, but you may also have to
also provide the source for the binaries as well. Which is a minor
pain (not a showstopper). That's based on my reading of the GPL:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#UnchangedJustBinary - I could
be wrong if this only applies to binaries updated/patched GPL'd
programs.

Second, it would have to be packaged properly to be completely
portable, right? Can all complimentary, non-libavcodec codecs (x264?
amr_nb/amr_wb? faac/faad? lame?) be packaged successfully into a
single binary?

This isn't to discourage you - neither of these may be blockers (and
they might both have easy answers). Let me know what you decide to do,
and if I can be any help.

Jon

[Kyle Drake]

I think this would be difficult to maintain. Which is unfortunate,
because I wholly agree that getting ffmpeg compiled is a pain in the
ass on a lot of systems, and it would be great to be able to
compartmentalize it.

The problem is that you'd need to maintain a binary copy of the
executable for over a dozen distributions, plus the version
differences (compiling against older libraries can cause drama). It's
kindof a big maintenance task just to do this, which is why most
software projects don't (with the exception of a few projects like
MySQL, who provide binaries so that they can control the binary for
purposes of debugging and code testing).

Good operating systems provide ffmpeg in a well-constructed ports
system. It's a breeze to install on OpenBSD, but it's a nightmare on
Macports (which IMHO is kindof a peice of shit).

-Kyle

[Rich Curtis]

Yes not a fan of macports.

I suspect you are correct about the maintenance angle.

I will poke around with RVideo and see where else I can help.

Thanks!

RC