Debian has chosen libav over ffmpeg?

[acimmarusti]

Dear all,

It seems Debian has chosen to use ffmpeg's fork - libav - instead of ffmpeg.

Does anyone know the reasoning behind this move? Curiously the name of the packages in Debian still cling to ffmpeg even in sid.

I'm only concerned, because it seems like ffmpeg is moving faster than libav (even though one of the claims for forking libav was that features were not being included as fast). So is this good for Debian at all?

What do you guys think?

[vbrummond]

Does libav completely replace ffmpeg?

*does some searching*

From what I see ffmpeg is built from the libav source package in Sid. So perhaps it is a drop in replacement.
http://packages.debian.org/source/sid/libav

Edit: Here we go: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=624807

[Mr James]

It would not be the first time the Debian devs do something weird. Why exactly does the mplayer package include the useless GTK gui (which is crap compared to gnome-mplayer, smplayer, and any other mplayer front end in existance) instead of spliting them into two packages - one for mplayer and another for the gui?

[acimmarusti]

Can you site the source of this information? Does libav completely replace ffmpeg?

From what I see ffmpeg is built from the libav source package in Sid. So perhaps it is a drop in replacement.
http://packages.debian.org/source/sid/libav

libva is a drop-in replacement for ffmpeg, but why switch to it when it seems that ffmpeg is putting out newer features at a faster rate than libva?

These are their homepages. In particular,
http://libav.org/index.html
http://ffmpeg.org/

The truth is I'm only guessing Debian is sticking to libva (but I think it's a pretty good guess), mainly because the version in Sid is at 0.7.2 (latest version of libva), but if you check ffmpeg's website they just released 0.9 (which is available to Debian users thanks to the debian multimedia repository)

I guess I just want to know why libva and not ffmpeg

[vbrummond]

I am curious as well. Perhaps ask at the mailing lists?

[acimmarusti]

Confirmed on the Debian multimedia maintainer's mailing list:

This is what I wrote:
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermai ... 22895.html

This is what a developer and/or maintainer replied:
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermai ... 22898.html

He didn't answer my questions..I will send a reply soon asking a few more things.

[acimmarusti]

Final response:

I wrote:
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermai ... 22903.html

The reply was:
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermai ... 23070.html

[vbrummond]

Thank for for posting the conclusion. I think I can trust this maintainer he seems to know what is best.

[acimmarusti]

Thank for for posting the conclusion. I think I can trust this maintainer he seems to know what is best.

Yes, I agree. libav definitely seems to suit Debian's goals better.