FFmpeg 5.0 Released For This Popular, Open-Source Multimedia Library

[brad0]

But why not version 4.5?

Various deprecated API and libavresample has been removed.

[rogerx]

My go to tool for converting any audio/video files.

Sometimes not always simple to work with, but gets the job done!

[coder]

That old Phoronix logo...

Where?

[coder]

"libplacebo filter"

Thats pretty cool. Libplacebo is MPV's vulkan scaling/debanding/tonemapping filters.

I hate the name. ...unless, of course, it doesn't actually do anything. Then, it would be great.

[pranav]

A noob question:

Is it because of licensing issue that Fedora doesn't provide ffmpeg package through the standard official repository?

But its GPLv3+ licensed, then why?!

[coder]

A noob question:

Is it because of licensing issue that Fedora doesn't provide ffmpeg package through the standard official repository?

But its GPLv3+ licensed, then why?!

Patents. If they distribute ffmpeg, then they're liable to pay royalties on patented technologies it implements.

Some distros (at least in the past) would distribute custom builds which disable these features, but the resulting ffmpeg isn't very useful. Worse, naive users would submit bugs in the official ffmpeg bug tracker against these disabled features not working, which the ffmpeg developers absolutely hate.

[brucethemoose]

I hate the name. ...unless, of course, it doesn't actually do anything. Then, it would be great.

It must be an inside joke, the joke being that all of MPV's fancy HQ processing doesn't actually make a discernable difference :P

[coder]

It must be an inside joke, the joke being that all of MPV's fancy HQ processing doesn't actually make a discernable difference :P

That's what I figured, but if it's shown to users under that name, I think it's not worth the confusion and uncertainty it could cause.

[OneTimeShot]

It would be useful if ffmpeg could have a "patent-safe" version with codecs >20 years old (as well as the free VP8/VP9/AV1 codecs). The MPEG4 stuff is now out of patent (heck... h264 is 19 years old now)...

[coder]

It would be useful if ffmpeg could have a "patent-safe" version with codecs >20 years old (as well as the free VP8/VP9/AV1 codecs). The MPEG4 stuff is now out of patent (heck... h264 is 19 years old now)...

I think it's not hard to disable that stuff. I'm not sure if it's there's exactly a convenience build switch for doing that, but the problem isn't that it's too difficult to build without patent infringements.

The problem is that a media player which can't even play H.264, AAC, and newer (non-free) codecs simply isn't very useful for most users.