FFmpeg's Leader Resigns, Hopes To Make Libav Developers Come Back

[wagaf]

We need something newer, because we always want something newer. And yes, PulseAudio did replace ALSA from a user perspective, which is what I wrote.

I know that it can be hard to accept as a geek, when you have finally mastered the art of ffmpeg after months of learning, when you know every of its options by heart and have become proud of yourself for all the things you know about it, but this is not the future of it. The future does not lie in command-line tools. It will be tools with minimal, but intelligent interfaces, which provide auto-detection of formats and devices, that anticipate the user's goal and guide them through it by predicting parameters. Tools that make it possible for anyone to do what a 25-year old geek can do now.

Do you realise a UI and a library are not opposing concepts ? A good library is a requirement to build an efficient UI. The hard part will still be the same as before : decoding the video and audio with right codecs, properly present the media to the user with minimum copies, all of this in a generic and platform-independent way etc.

Reinventing the wheel won't make your UI better or more powerful, but it's gonna take much longer to do. Honestly to achieve what you suggest I would probably use GStreamer, an excellent higher-level Free multimedia library, rather than FFmpeg/LibAV.

After a decade of UI development using GStreamer, you would end up with a very generic UI at the same level as VLC today that can do everything.

[profoundWHALE]

We need something newer, because we always want something newer. And yes, PulseAudio did replace ALSA from a user perspective, which is what I wrote.

I'm a little confused here...
OSS was replaced by ALSA, Pulseaudio is a completely new solution, JACK for the average user. None of these were forked from another.

We're talking about FFmpeg, which was forked and created Libav, and now the two projects are practically the same in features, but everything breaks because they aren't really -working together-, just borrowing from each other, sometimes going through the effort of completely rewriting something that already had a good implementation.

In comparison, when you say that it's like saying:

To elaborate on this further, for example gstreamer was replaced by ffmpeg, which has been replaced by mplayer, should both groups combine their efforts in a next generation project.

And this is why everyone thinks that you're technically wrong... in a decision that I would consider technical.

As far as a userbase is concerned, you are right, that's how they probably see things... but now you just tried to make a technical argument for a change to two of the largest video/audio projects in the open source world, based off the knowledge and perspective of the average joe.

Anyways, I'll get back to this here

To elaborate on this further, for example OSS was replaced by ALSA, which has been replaced by PulseAudio, should both groups combine their efforts in a next generation project.

What you're describing is the situation with mplayer, mplayer2, and mpv. I'd seriously recommend checking mpv out.