A Voice from the Other Side

Libav is very much alive, churning out regular releases, daily commits, lots of activity on both the development mailing list and IRC channel, and new developers joining. All of the code from libav is merged into FFmpeg without credit or thanks, bolstering FFmpeg's perceived activity.

What libav clearly has less of is brand name recognition. One side of the split managed to grab ahold of the domain name and now presents itself as the original and true FFmpeg. The split created long-lived forks, none of the sides has more legitimacy in claiming to be the true FFmpeg than the other.

> The X.org fork of XFree86, for example, jump-started the development community and led to a rapid modernization of the code and increase in functionality. Three years later, it is not at all clear that the libav fork has succeeded in this way.

For better or worse, and for all the mistakes that are so easy to identify in hindsight, the split was the best thing that happened to FFmpeg in years. Not much different than with X.org vs. XFree86, the development community was jump-started and the code base rapidly modernized including an increase in functionality.

FFmpeg was poorly managed, stagnating, never made formal releases, had strict territorial code ownership, and a number of developers had stopped working on the project, leaving in frustration. Upsetting the dictatorial management structure brought them back and with them a lot of code and energy to work on the centerpiece of FOSS multimedia. Both projects have since moved to more modern tools and development practices.

Libav has led a big number of long-overdue overhauls of the library APIs, large-scale refactorings, and cleanups that included throwing away cruft and functionality that was not worth the maintenance burden. Before, attempts to do the same in the old project failed.

> In particular, the fuzzing work done at Google has led to over 1,000 separate bugs being fixed in ffmpeg.

The security issue is a complete red herring. It's quite simple really, both are horrid. Whether or not one has 1000 crashers and the other only 900 or the other way around is immaterial when the supply of bugs is basically infinite. If 1000 bugs get fixed, one should start to wonder how so many got there in the first place and how many more might be lurking.

Much of the old codebase was written during times when error checking was considered an optional nuisance or directly skipped to speed up decoding. Fuzzing is a great way to find bugs, but there is plenty to be found with good old grep or opening a random source file in your favorite editor and reading. Maybe we will live to see the day when the libraries are robust, but at this point it is very far off in the future. Adding all that error checking is not that much fun nor likely to make you rich or a featured celebrity.

Also note that many of the CVEs and bugs fixed in FFmpeg simply do not apply to libav or get fixed there in a more thorough fashion.

> compatibility problems between libav and programs like mplayer and the XBMC media center system.

Forget MPlayer, its successor mplayer2 and mpv, the successor of mplayer2, are much better. The codebase was cleaned up of old cruft while adding useful features. I put countless hours over many years into MPlayer, yet I'm not missing it. MPlayer did not age all that well, it is keeping its userbase and developers through gravity mostly. People don't switch because they have never heard of the alternatives. If MPlayer leaving Debian gives the alternatives a place in the spotlight, all the better.

XBMC (now called Kodi apparently) works with libav the last time I checked. In any case packaging Kodi/XBMC for Debian is going to be a gargantuan undertaking. Debian forbids embedded library copies of which XBMC has a metric gigaton.

> defenders of libav were mostly conspicuous in their absence.

Conspicuously absent are members of the libav community with the willingness or energy to join the next - this time on a Debian mailing list - trollfest. But unfortunately nobody seems to notice a lack of negativity, neither now nor at any of the previous occasions. People seem to prefer forming their opinion by reading mudslinging in random forums[1] rather than by reading patches, and by all accounts the mud does stick.

[1] No, this is not a thinly-veiled reference to lwn.net.