FFmpeg deprecated (in Ubuntu)?

[dinkypumpkin]

On 28/06/2012 01:22, Andy Bircumshaw wrote:
> On 27 June 2012, at 20:57, dinkypumpkin wrote:
>> On 27/06/2012 19:08, Andy Bircumshaw wrote:
>>> Gentoo now has a package virtual/ffmpeg which is fulfilled by either media-video/ffmpeg or media-video/libav.
>>
>> Thanks for that.  Since we gratefully junked Gentoo at work I haven't paid much attention to it and it's clear I'm behind the times.  I have to give them a lot of credit for trying to bridge the divide, but that seems like a heck of a lot of work for a little bit of user choice.
>
> On Gentoo, it's actually pretty trivial to add the virtual.

I was thinking more of the work required on the Gentoo side to police 
ABI/API compatibility, validate dependencies, check patches, etc.  But 
then Gentoo is in a different niche.  All the other distros that 
provides binary packages would have to pick one fork or the other for 
sanity's sake.

> There's a little work to ensure that packages now depend on the virtual, instead of the previous media-video/ffmpeg package. And of course compatibility may start to become a problem in the future - then they may need to stop depending on the virtual again and instead directly upon ffmpeg or libav respectively. I imagine that  media-video/ffmpeg and media-video/libav now block each other.
>
> But for it's stuff like this that I use Gentoo - I want to be able to make the choice for myself.

 From the perspective of get_iplayer, I hope Libav vs. FFmpeg remains a 
distinction without a difference for a long time to come.  Fortunately, 
get_iplayer only has to worry about ABI/API breakage indirectly via its 
dependencies.

Since each fork can always take code from the other, it's difficult to 
see how either one will present a compelling advantage to the average 
joe who just wants to convert a few files in the more popular formats. 
Users with more specialised needs may have a reason to pick one or the 
other for certain codecs, but I hope the BBC never forces get_iplayer 
into that category.