Time to orphan libquicktime?

[Reinhard Tartler]

On Mon, Mar 17, 2014 at 8:18 AM, forum::für::umläute
<zmoelnig at umlaeute.mur.at> wrote:
> still with my upstream hat on:
>
> On 2014-03-17 12:52, Reinhard Tartler wrote:
>> Since it is possible to have a LGPL version of libav as well (we just
>> don't provide one in Debian), wouldn't it be easier for everyone if
>> you used libavformat directly?
>
> one of the core reasons i have used both libquicktime and
> gmerlin-avdecoder as upstream has been that i *never ever* want to touch
> anything with an API as volatile as ffmpeg/libav.
>
> maybe the API of libav/ffmpeg has become more stable over the last
> years. maybe not. frankly i don't care, as
> libquicktime/gmerlin-avdecoder has allowed me to not care, and i think
> this a feature i would hate to miss.

With libquicktime being dormant, I fear that this is a luxury that is
in danger. I understand that for this reason, you would be unwilling
to take over libquicktime upstream, which needs to deal with the libav
API details.

BTW, I think your anger about the libav API is largely unwarranted
these days. In earlier releases, there was a lot of crap exposed to
applications in a very unfortunate way. Unfortunate, because it was
very fragile and causing a lot of frustration both on the upstream as
well as on the downstream side. Today's AVOption and AVFrame API offer
a much better, and way more stable API, to manipulate many fringe
features, many of which have now been even removed.

Also, have you considered using https://github.com/FFMS/ffms2 instead
of libquicktime? It seems to target a very similar problem (allow
avoiding the libav* API) and seems to be actually maintained upstream.


-- 
regards,
    Reinhard