Re: FFmpeg bundling exception for XBMC
On 02/24/2014 07:20 AM, Ken Dreyer wrote:
Hi folks,
Alex Lancaster recently pointed out that XBMC upstream has completely
removed the option to use an external FFmpeg.
https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/4005
FFmpeg has been a long ongoing saga with XBMC. The XBMC developers
develop their own patches to their private FFmpeg fork, and Alex and I
have had various success or failure over the years with unbundling
FFmpeg in the past. Unfortunately XBMC has recently taken steps in the
direction to make this harder, at least for the v13 "Gotham" release.
The summary is that Alex and I need a bundling exception from the RPM
Fusion developer community in order to keep XBMC in RPM Fusion.
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From what I can tell, the three reasons that the XBMC developers
bundle FFmpeg are:
There are 2 strong reasons to not bundle FFMPEG:
* Users (eg. me) rebuild rpmfusion's ffmpeg with options not supported
by rpmfusion:
=> rpmfusion bundling xbmc's ffmpeg would void this undertaking and
reduce rpmfusion's usability.
* ffmpeg is quite security sensitive (AFAICT, e.g. Google recently
reported (IIRC), ca. 1000 bugs, which reportedly were incorporated into
upstream ffmpeg)
=> XBMC's bundling imposes severe security risks on both XMBC and rpmfusion
That said, I am quite opposed to let rpmfusion bundle ffmpeg and am in
favor of staying hard for didacitcal, to teach upstream XBMC that their
undertaking is counterproductive.
Ralf