FFmpeg deprecated (in Ubuntu)?

[Andy Bircumshaw]

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.

This is the new package:
http://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-x86/virtual/ffmpeg/ffmpeg-0.10.3.ebuild?revision=1.6

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.

aB.