2013/5/26 Julian Sikorski <belegdol(a)gmail.com&gt; completely different soname than the latest ffmpeg at the date it was introduced. So it was possible to install theses compat libraries along with a modern ffmpeg (provided that no project was resolving symbol at runtime, or using dependencies linked with both ffmpeg library version). One other reason to choose 0.6 instead of 0.7 at that time was that many of the improvements of 0.7 over 0.6 was related to make it easier for project using ffmpeg to be compatible with more modern API. It was also related to the split between FFmpeg/Libav because FFmpeg try to keep compatibility. And just after the split, the early 0.7 branch was not as good as using release before the split IMO. Compatibility API is not something targeted for such compat package, as the aim is to stay with a given API. So the 0.6 version was picked instead. So if it's easier to maintain 0.5, it can be downgraded to that version instead and rebuild the dependencies. Nicolas (kwizart)