The FFmpeg vs. Libav War Continues In Debian Land

[profoundWHALE]

OK, I made my point, enough of this.

You actually lasted longer and stayed calmer than I thought you would have.

Personally, I use ffmpeg a lot more simply because of mpv. On windows I've been using ffdshow tryouts for frame interpolation through Avisynth. Otherwise I'm usually using libav. On Linux it's 99% ffmpeg.

[Luke_Wolf]

Oh boy, maybe I should start looking into a new Debian-based Phoenix Wright case before it's too late

Please do, and maybe set up a site hosting links to the cases in a centralized location so we don't have to dig through the forums to find them

[Akka]

Hard to say about technical facts. Both seem to work for me. I know many people use libav, mplayer, gstreamer, xbmc. Other fanboys think ffmpeg, mpv and vlc solve things better. I think it's worth noting that Ubuntu is the biggest distro for consumers and gamers and multimedia users. Thus if Ubuntu uses libav and gstreamer/gnome technologies, maybe that's the way consumer friendly distros should go?

I dont think mplayer and libav is compatible anymore. This days you need ffempg for mplayer, this is one of the motivation debian have for including ffmpeg again.
Ubuntu us libav becouse they get it from debian. Debian use libav becouse one of the libav devs is the package maintainer at debian.

[tuke81]

I dont think mplayer and libav is compatible anymore. This days you need ffempg for mplayer, this is one of the motivation debian have for including ffmpeg again.
Ubuntu us libav becouse they get it from debian. Debian use libav becouse one of the libav devs is the package maintainer at debian.

Afaik they never were compatible, thus there were fork called mplayer2 with dropped mencoder and stuff...

...And lately new mplayer2 fork called mpv, which works with both, but preferred is now ffmpeg.

[pixi]

Afaik they never were compatible, thus there were fork called mplayer2 with dropped mencoder and stuff...

Saying "thus" is incorrect here. MPlayer got forked because some developers had issues with one of them. The fact that mplayer2 chose to follow libav a bit more closely than ffmpeg is unrelated (actually, it is probably mostly because some developers are shared between mplayer and ffmpeg).

[Ansla]

Gentoo and OpenSuSE switched to libav as well if I am not mistake.

Since last year the default provider for virtual/ffmpeg in Gentoo has been changed to libav.

Not sure why they did it but, like others have said before, Gentoo allows you to choose which one you want installed and all my computers are still using the real ffmpeg.

[iive]

I cannot share your opinion, because it is one sided. The libav people left and started their own. What more could you possibly want of people who do not like to work with you and who want to do it their way?

They did not.

At 2011.01.18 they announced takeover of FFmpeg project. The server root administrators imposed the new (Libav) rules on everybody. Since only the inner circle had write access, it was quite easy to push away the people who did not support the takeover, by ignoring their patches and their input.
This resulted into horrible flame fest.

Two months later, the people who were not happy with the new course of the project took back the FFmpeg domain and name. The takeovers could not use FFmpeg name anymore so they had to choose a new one - Libav.

Libav however never admitted of been a fork. Even their 2011.03.13 announcement says "We, as a group of FFmpeg developers, have decided to continue developing FFmpeg under the name Libav". (Four days later they released ffmpeg-0.5.4. )

Just to make it clear, FFmpeg had to find new server hosting and recreate its own infrastructure from scratch, because the original server have been taken over. What is worse, few months later MPlayer project was also kicked out from the original server, despite the fact that the server was bought by donations given to MPlayer.


If you admire these people for what they did... you must be either ignorant or horrible person.

[Isedonde]

It has been proposed to let the Debian tech-ctte decide on the libav vs. ffmpeg issue.

Let's hope ffmpeg vs. libav will not turn into the systemd vs. SysVInit thing. Well, it's unlikely, seeing how the only supporters of libav are basically the Debian libav maintainers and 1 or 2 more guys.

Looking forward to ffmpeg in Ubuntu. <3

[profoundWHALE]

It has been proposed to let the Debian tech-ctte decide on the libav vs. ffmpeg issue.

Let's hope ffmpeg vs. libav will not turn into the systemd vs. SysVInit thing. Well, it's unlikely, seeing how the only supporters of libav are basically the Debian libav maintainers and 1 or 2 more guys.

Looking forward to ffmpeg in Ubuntu. <3

But there were plenty of Debian maintainers who liked Upstart as well. When they take the time to sit down and decide on something, they actually make good decisions.