Reintroducing FFmpeg to Debian

[Jose Luis Rivas]

On 28/07/14, 01:20am, Andreas Cadhalpun wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> some of you may have noticed a weird ffmpeg package in the NEW queue[1].
> Let me explain:
> 
> In 2011 Libav[2] was forked from FFmpeg[3]. It was a time of great
> uncertainty, the fork happened with much drama that didn't help making a
> technical cut, and at that peculiar time Debian switched to Libav.
 
Hi Andreas and everyone,

FWIW, my experience with this is that I had to make my own FFmpeg
package a while ago [0] because I needed it for a project I was working
on at the moment [1].

[0] https://github.com/ghostbar/FFmpeg.deb
[1] https://github.com/ghostbar/RTSP-Streaming.js

The reason for having to package my own FFmpeg is the current libav
which is taking the space of ffmpeg seemed to conflict with every other
ffmpeg package out there, including marillat's and for my project I
actually needed ffmpeg, not libav since it didn't had the functionality.
(More specifically: the ability to take still images from an rtsp
stream).

Not having FFmpeg available in the debian repositories is a nuissance,
and certainly having libav instead which seems to be a fork yet not
having the full FFmpeg functionality and using the same package name is
worst. I didn't figured this out at first because the binary said
`ffmpeg`. Of course, I'm talking about [2] since now that seems to not
be an issue yet remains the lack of functionality.

[2] https://packages.debian.org/wheezy/ffmpeg

If the issue is that this would mean having to fix security bugs twice
then it would be reasonable to stop shipping libav and instead ship
ffmpeg, since has more functionality and AFAICS from their repos bunch 
of active bug-fixing.

I honestly do not understand why ffmpeg is not in the repos nor why
there seems to be an active movement to block it.

Kind regards.
-- 
Jose Luis Rivas · ghostbar <http://ghostbar.co>
The Debian Project · <http://www.debian.org>
GPG · D278 F9C1 5E54 61AA 3C1E  2FCD 13EC 43EE B9AC 8C43
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