FFmepg rebuild Schedule ?

[Nicolas Chauvet]

2012/6/25 Hans de Goede <j.w.r.degoede at gmail.com>:
> Hi,
..
> gstreamer-ffmpeg is a problem, as upstream is using/supporting only libav
I'm not sure to understand on which version you have based you analyse on ?
gst-ffmpeg latest version is 0.11.2 back to march, which is 'around
the same date' of the latest API change from ffmpeg development
version.
Instead we have gstreamer 0.10 infrastrucuture from fedora.

I don't know the development status of gstreamer 0.11, but if the
stable version will not be due to Fedora 18 GA, then we might use
ffmpeg-compat for easier transition. (or to backport changes from
gst-ffmpeg-0.11.2 if it has support for recent ffmpeg).

> ffmpeg, and the 2 seem to have grown apart quite a bit API wise with the
> last ffmpeg
> release. I've been looking at patching gstreamer-ffmpeg to build with ffmpeg
> rather
> then libav, but the 2 really have grown too far apart, requiring too many
> changes,
> which will surely introduce a lot of bugs.
vlc upstream advertised compatibility with both ffmpeg and libav. But
they came back to provide binaries built with ffmpeg.
At the time of the switch, their analyze was that ffmpeg was a better
upstream, specially as they re-integrate security fixes and features
from libav whereas libav doesn't.

I would like to avoid any topic that would revisit the previous
decision to stay with FFmpeg in RPM Fusion. I might have been
suspicious at the time of the fork, I saw the line have changes from
ffmpeg.org perspective and improved. But I have no doubt that is was
the correct decision.

> So we've 4 options:

> 1) Try to patch gstreamer-ffmpeg to build with new ffmpeg, tried and failed
This failure is suspicious to me, vlc upstream can be built with
either libav of ffmpeg and binaries are nowadays provided with ffmpeg,
which is more

> 2) Build gstreamer-ffmpeg with an old ffmpeg-compat. May work for now, but
> seems like
> a dead end in the long run, as I'm sure we don't want to have an
> ffmpeg-compat
ffmpeg-compat (0.6x branch) is still maintained security wise. This is
what will be done for EL-6 since this version will match the gstreamer
components there. I can be used as a transition state.
Also it could be investigated to move to branch 0.7 for ffmpeg-compat
which is advertised as using the same "oldabi" from ffmpeg-0.6.

> 3) Build gstreamer-ffmpeg with its bundled libav copy, this is actually the
> advised
> way to ship gstreamer-ffmpeg by upstream.
It can hardly be done, we will miss the benefit of sse2 in i686 by
default and others CPU related optimization.
(not even talking about ARM case here). That will be a duplicate
maintenance effort anyway. (as usually with internal built).

> 4) Package libav in such a way that it is parallel installable to ffmpeg,
> use a system
Last I've checked, it couldn't be done without forging a non-existant
ABI as ffmpeg/libav are mutually exclusive system wide.

Nicolas (kwizart)