Is there any plan to split ffmpeg into ffmpeg(without patent issue) and ffmeeg-freeworld?

[Nicolas Chauvet]

2010/4/27 Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski <dominik at greysector.net>:
> On Monday, 26 April 2010 at 06:39, Chen Lei wrote:
>> Hi all.
>>
>> Debian guys already split ffmepg into two parts and ship them separately
>> in debian and debian-multimedia. And I realized that RHEL5 also have
>> a stripped patent-free qffmpeg package.
>> See http://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/enterprise/5Server/en/os/SRPMS/qffmpeg-0.4.9-0.15.20080908.el5.src.rpm
>> Could we also split it for fedora and rpmfusion? I think it'll benefit
>> fedora a lot.
>
> Interesting, but I see the only codec it has is mjpeg. Everything else is
> disabled and removed from the source tarball. I don't think it's useful
> for much, but feel free to try to convince me otherwise.
>
> You could start with providing a list of applications that could go into
> Fedora with a dependency on a stripped-down ffmpeg package and a list
> of codecs that we would need to have in such package for it to be usable
> with these applications.
Above libavcodec and the related codec that would be involved, there
are lot of others features that FFmpeg provides.
One probably cannot imagine the number of fedora packages using or
that could use one or the other FFmpeg library without requesting a
particular patented codec.

One example that we already have is picard-freeworld which rely on
libavformat/libavcodec to extract some informations from the
multimedia file and cannot be enabled in the fedora package itself
because the FFmpeg headers aren't present.
If we could have a basic FFmpeg in Fedora, with the whole set of
headers, then we could avoid to split this package. Because that's a
hard mess.
The downside would be to verify each time either or not picard with
FFmpeg enabled rely on a function that might not be present in the
light fedora version of FFmpeg.

Others packages that will benefit from this is blender, linphone
(update to 3.0.0 is avoided in Fedora because it mandotary needs
FFmpeg), vlc (currently in review within fedora), pulseaudio-libs.
(using a static version currently) and probably many others.

The other big subject is: "Is such patentless FFmpeg could enable GPU
accelereated Video" , either with libvdpau or libva ?
That's probably a question that worth to ask to FE-Legal.

But technically having FFmpeg in Fedora can be possible and would
worth it, even if no more codec are added. The other side of the
question is , Will we experience unrecoverable regressions with such
split ?
Because if it is possible, then we might just simply do it.

To have FFmpeg in Fedora, I would just built the library from stripped
source with a special suffix SONAME and using alternatives with a low
number for the pc files. Then with the same revision of the unstripped
sources, the standard version only with libavcodec. (along with a
tweaked library using the same SONAME). That way, codec that was not
available in the package built with the fedora FFmpeg version will
become available.


Nicolas (kwizart)