Author's here.<p>I'm not sure why this is posted here, but please note that this was written more than 10 years ago, and a lot of things changed since then. It's important to take this article from an historical perspective, keeping in mind that it was written by someone with "interests" in the matter (as much as I wanted to be objective, let's not lie to ourselves, I was a FFmpeg developer first). The popularity of this article played an important role in "public's opinion" (it's my most popular article ever).<p>Nowadays, even though I've been distant to the project for years now, I can say the situation changed in a good way (from my perspective). The projects are unified again because people from both sides made difficult compromises. I think it would make sense to focus on how the issue was resolved rather that why it was so bad. This fire is extinguished, let's work on keeping things as peaceful as we can.<p>For the record, I mostly left FFmpeg development years ago. And while it wasn't the only factor, the merge effort and overall tension actually drained me pretty badly at that time. Of course, this is also true for several people from both sides, and surprising to no one the project(s) lost many developers in the process.<p>The multimedia community is plagued with drama like this, but this one was particularly destructive. We can certainly take lessons from this, but I'll leave that to the historians.
The thing I most remember about this piece of history was that Debian, if you told it to install ffmpeg, barfed a message which said "ffmpeg is deprecated, you should switch to avconv".<p>I knew that wasn't true, and it was pretty insulting to be so brazenly lied to like that. It degraded my opinion of the Debian distro several notches.<p>(Also, remember when the version of the Bitcoin client in the Debian repo contained hardcoded addresses of several gambling sites which it prevented you from sending to? I think it was pretty clear that Debian maintainers had a lot of power, and sometimes abused that power.)<p>(Edit: It seems my memory is faulty, and this "modified" version of the bitcoin client was distributed with Gentoo, not Debian: <a href="https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2014/10/17/the-blacklist-debate-when-is-it-ok-to-meddle-with-bitcoins-code/" rel="nofollow">https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2014/10/17/the-blacklist-de...</a> )
Discussed at the time:<p><i>The FFmpeg/Libav situation</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4183209" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4183209</a> - June 2012 (51 comments)
I wish this post went further back and outlined Fabrice Bellards involvement in ffmpeg - his website says only "FFMPEG, the Open Source Multimedia System. I launched this project in year 2000 and led it for several years. " - I'd be curious to know more about that part of the history.
Anecdotally, libav/ffmpeg have the worst API I've ever had the displeasure of using. Getting anything working falls firmly in the realm of masochism.
What about gstreamer?<p>I asked ChatGPT for an example to work in memory instead of ffmpeg with files and it just went on and on... plus the dependencies were pretty clearly most at home on Linux.<p>Might have been my inexperience?