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The FFmpeg vs. Libav War Continues In Debian Land

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  • #31
    Originally posted by sdack View Post
    Gentoo and OpenSuSE switched to libav as well if I am not mistake.
    Gentoo has libav and ffmpeg, it is your choice what to use, as always in Gentoo.

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    • #32
      Originally posted by sdack View Post
      Gentoo and OpenSuSE switched to libav as well if I am not mistake.
      openSUSE is in the same situation of Fedora. Packman (equivalent to RPMFusion) uses FFMpeg.

      Only Debian, Ubuntu and Sabayon use libav. Gentoo has the two.

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      • #33
        Originally posted by sdack View Post
        You do not have to read every flame and troll to know what is going on. The code was lingering in an alpha state for a long time with more and more people depending on ffmpeg while the project kept sucking up codecs from all around without giving much thought to stability, sanity and security. The consent of the leadership was that as long as it compiles and runs is it not broken.
        I have no idea where you have gotten your impressions, but what you've written is simply not true.

        The old project was all for stability. There were no complains about lack of code review, including too much code or lots of bugs. Quite the contrary, the code ought to have been perfect before inclusion. Not only free of bugs, not only formatted, but also as fast as possible. The complains were mostly about the insanely hard multi-pass reviews, turning away newcomers and stagnating the project. Some referred to the process as "shaving pigs".

        A lot of the fork supporters wanted change. And after the fork FFmpeg changed drastically, it went with something that was closer to the Linux kernel development model. And IMHO, it worked quite well. It have established a healthy community around FFmpeg and brought a number of new developers.

        On the other side, Libav policy changes were gradual and did not brought enough improvements, quite the contrary. While Libav allowed a patch to be approved by any 2 developers, it also took away the write access on everybody outside their inner circle, including most of their supporters.

        Nowdays most of these who supported the fork don't code for either project anymore. Few people have returned to FFmpeg. The Libav also lost some of their inner circle and the new recruits are barely enough to replace them. These with write access are overworked and delay reviews. It is normal to hear "I'm not paid for it". Shaving pigs is still around, this time with whitespace formatting and alphabetical ordering. All this is causing stagnation.

        Libav is still viable only because it is the only framework available in Debian and all (popular) Debian based distributions. If FFmpeg is allowed into Debain then most of the projects would prefer it and this would leave Libav outside in the cold.

        This is why keeping FFmpeg outside of Debian is so important, for them. IMHO it is quite scary to see how a couple of Debian maintainers could have so much authoritarian power over it.

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        • #34
          As for me I would prefer to see ffmpeg, because:
          1) Libav devs are uncooperative and this often delays their project compared to ffmpeg in adoption of various techs. Ffmpeg is generally faster at various formats support and so on.
          2) Libav devs were breaking API here and there all the time, (re)namig tools and calling all sorts of things "deprecated" and doing other collateral damage. I fail to see any obvious gains from this activilty which would justify collateral damage. I'm really fed up with this. It has come to the fact building apps using ffmpeg turned into rocket science and its is libav who holds credits on this sad fact.
          3) Libav devs are unable to offer reasonable quality. Seriously, how the heck you guys manage to break smacker video decode every second version or so? Ffmpeg had it working for ages. When debian switched, it gone bugged within year and since then its like russian roulette. Its just amazing.

          The only positive achievement I can see from all this activity is the fact ffmpeg now uses git instead of ancient and crappy svn. But everything else is rather unpleasant to my taste. I got ton of headache, ranging from scripts that stopped working up to trouble building programs and I fail to see any improvement which would justify all this crap.
          Last edited by 0xBADCODE; 29 July 2014, 06:47 PM.

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          • #35
            You can install ffmpeg from source, someone could do a PPA

            Originally posted by Isedonde View Post
            So it looks like ffmpeg is better from a technical POV, possibly fixing bugs in various Debian multimedia applications and enabling some other apps (like mplayer) to build. libav causes bugs in Debian applications and causes builds to fail, so there's no mplayer in Debian unstable.

            I've read a few reports by users who fixed bugs simply by installing ffmpeg from a third-party repository. ffmpeg is simply moving and fixing bugs faster than libav.

            The only reason why libav exists and is used in Debian is some fight between ffmpeg developers that resulted in a fork, and unfortunately, the Debian ffmpeg maintainer was on the libav side of the fight. And now he's unwilling to package ffmpeg, because the ffmpeg devs are his enemy. And it looks like he's also trying to prevent ffmpeg from re-entering Debian when maintained by someone else who is on neither side of the ffmpeg/libav conflict. It's a pity that Debian and Ubuntu users are now stuck with sub-par multimedia libraries.
            This sort of thing could be easily countered in Ubuntu by a PPA, no reason such a PPA could not also have a debian version for manual addition to /etc/apt/sources.list . Apt won't give two shits in a bucket whether or not Debian is "supposed" to support a PPA so long as the PPA includes a version complied against Debian for this purpose.

            I switched my Ubuntu-based systems to ffmpeg months ago, compiled it myself copied everything into a set of directories on the desktop, created debian control files for them, set all of them to root ownership, and used dpkg-deb -b to make them into debian packages which I then installed manually. Only one package then had to be revised, I had to get MPV from a ppa to get it to work.

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            • #36
              Well, from my restricted experience, as an user, with libav and its tools, I think it's better than (the old) ffmpeg.
              And if we will judge technical needs... could make a parallelism between ffmpeg and openssl? I mean, there was no technical need to fork/replace it, except that it's been shown openssl is just a mess.

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              • #37
                Originally posted by asdfblah View Post
                Well, from my restricted experience, as an user, with libav and its tools, I think it's better than (the old) ffmpeg.
                And if we will judge technical needs... could make a parallelism between ffmpeg and openssl? I mean, there was no technical need to fork/replace it, except that it's been shown openssl is just a mess.
                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?

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                • #38
                  I've always been using ffmpeg. I compile it myself since Slackware do not ship neither ffmpeg nor libav.
                  I find it a extremely versatile and efficient tool : since I deal a lot with many video codecs, I'm always pleased to see how well ffmpeg manages everything I throw at it, much better than any Windows tool, and its outputs seems generally very clean, as I hardly have any trouble with the videos I make. The recent filters addition is extremely welcomed.

                  The libav fork may have been justified at the time it was made. But to me 1/ it was badly managed since they never acknowledged it was a fork and instead presented themselves as "the new ffmpeg", the old one being "deprecated", which is a pretty ugly way to do it, 2/ they seem to have fallen somehow into the same management problems they were condemning.

                  As of today, ffmpeg seems more active than libav, improving faster. The development ML do seem to be more active on ffmpeg side, at least from the number of posts point of view. And the management of the project seems to have greatly improved, which is indeed a good side-effect of this fork.
                  So it seems pretty obvious to me that the non-inclusion of ffmpeg in Debian is purely political and not related to technical or management issue anymore. And that seems very weak to me.

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                  • #39
                    Originally posted by phoronix.com
                    there's some measurable resistance to adding FFmpeg back to the repository
                    Yeah. From pro-libav retards.

                    Libav is the #2 worst thing that ever happened to Debian.

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                    • #40
                      Originally posted by rvdboom View Post
                      The libav fork may have been justified at the time it was made.
                      It was never justified. When it started it was 50% "look at me I'm the newest drama queen!" and 50% pure unabashed anti-ffmpeg trolling. And Libav developers have never even pretended to be constructive. I don't know what Debian maintainers smoked on the day they decided to scratch ffmpeg in favor of this abomination but it sure was powerful stuff.

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