The FFmpeg/Libav situation

I know its a limited view of reality, but I was debugging ffserver, found the bug and mentioned it on FFmpeg's IRC channel. Michael added my own one-liner change and listed me as the author for the git commit. This is a GREAT feeling for a newcomer to a project and it makes me want to keep helping with FFmpeg.<p>I agree with the author of this article in that FFmpeg will eventually win out, just for little things like this.

I read the entire article carefully, thinking about various other schisms in the Open Source World (Net/OpenBDS being the one that came to my mind first) - and reflected on how important leadership is in many of those communities. For better or worse, the (in most cases) benevolent dictatorship of people like Theo (OpenBSD), Linus (Linux), and Guido (Python) play an important role in herding their respective cats.<p>It might be interesting to see how effective (if such a thing could even be measured) communities with benevolent dictators perform as compared to those that operate by consensus/voting.

I tried to get involved in FFmpeg development several years ago, and felt driven off by the existing community. It wasn't so much any one individual, but the absence any "adult" voice trying to keep things moving forward. There are a lot of smart programmers there, and a lot of loud people on the list, but no real correspondence between the two traits.<p>The quality of the code base also left something to be desired. It was fast, and generally worked, but they certainly didn't subscribe to the camp that believes in treating compiler warnings as errors. I remember using Valgrind and discovering that some memory was being used uninitialized, and submitting a patch. The patch was rejected with a comment such as "not needed". I still don't know if this was correct, but I do know that being a static initializer my patch wasn't going to slow anything down.

I was curious as to which distros default to ffmpeg and which default to libav, looking at my distro of choice (Arch Linux) it's ffmpeg, there's no libav in the official repos as far as I can tell and programs like VLC, Blender, MPlayer2 all link to ffmpeg, Mplayer on the other hand links directly against the core codec libraries unless I'm mistaken.<p>The article states that Debian (and Ubuntu?) uses libav (and yes, the bs about ffmpeg being deprecated is obviously a douchebag move), so does anyone know what other distros are defaulting to, Gentoo, Fedora, OpenSUSE etc?

My only direct interaction with ffmpeg and libavcodec/libavformat has been from a user and developer stand point. Most of it has been very poor, the code works well, but their API both the C interface and the CLI could be a lot better.

This all sounds very Hatfield/McCoy to me. Whether or not libav is a PITA/POS, I don't know, but of the two, I had only heard of and used ffmpeg until now. That said, I really don't give a crap how either of them operate, and neither should anyone else but the maintainers. This reminds me so much of the volunteer work that happens at our school. So many personalities involved and people get so upset because they've poured their heart and soul into it. You don't find that as often on the business/corporate side of things. Even though real money is on the line there, it is just a job. I think the same thing applies here. These people are getting so upset, but I doubt they realize that 95-98% of users <i>don't give a crap</i>. We are just glad that you are providing great libraries and utilities. So... take a chill pill and get over it. And thanks for your work.

Has Hendrik Leppkes ever discussed why he chose FFmpeg for his popular LAV Filters project?

well this is fitting. lost ~4 hours yesteday trying to compile ffmpeg properly to work with newly enabled codecs and kdenlive - errors on errors on errors - with very little resources to help out. what a mess.

Debian's maintainer stance isn't really an issue since Christian Marillat is the defacto Multimedia maintainer: <a href="http://www.deb-multimedia.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.deb-multimedia.org/</a>

For me the link is an unreadable low contrast website. Come on folks; make your websites accessible.