Debian to switch back to ffmpeg

[Posted July 8, 2015 by corbet]

From:		Alessio Treglia <alessio-AT-debian.org>
To:		debian-devel-announce-AT-lists.debian.org
Subject:		libav and FFmpeg: switch over
Date:		Wed, 08 Jul 2015 09:39:51 +0100
Message-ID:		<559CE1D7.8060903@debian.org>
Archive-link:		Article

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Hash: SHA512

Hello,


After a careful review of all the pros and cons we, the Debian
Multimedia Maintainers team, have finally decided to switch from Libav
to FFmpeg as provider for the libav* multimedia libraries. We'll try
our best to make this happen in time for stretch.

The main arguments for using FFmpeg are summarized on the wiki [1],
while the full discussion can be found on the
pkg-multimedia-maintainers mailing list, starting at [2].

Finally we want to thank very much Reinhard Tartler for the tremendous
efforts he put in place while serving as both upstream developer and
Debian's primary maintainer for Libav in the past 4 years. We all owe
him a great debt of gratitude for that.


Cheers!

   Alessio Treglia
        on behalf of the Debian Multimedia Maintainers


[1] https://wiki.debian.org/Debate/libav-provider/ffmpeg
[2] http://bit.ly/1LW0sJ4

- -- 
Alessio Treglia          | www.alessiotreglia.com
Debian Developer         |     alessio@debian.org
Ubuntu Core Developer    |  quadrispro@ubuntu.com
0416 0004 A827 6E40 BB98 90FB E8A4 8AE5 311D 765A
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(Log in to post comments)

Heartfelt thanks

Posted Jul 8, 2015 21:42 UTC (Wed) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

Thank you to all the multimedia maintainers. All too often there are no good choices, and you are left to pick the least bad choice, and then everyone complains. But my experience has been of frequent new highs, amid setbacks.

Sometimes only vlc works, sometimes only totem, sometimes only smplayer, but lately, always at least one, and all three at the moment. Replacing mplayer with mplayer2 helped, recently. (Lately none work, for x.264, if I have audio muted (?!).) I am always astonished, pleased, and impressed every time I find that any of it works.

Heartfelt thanks

Posted Jul 8, 2015 23:13 UTC (Wed) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

I have to agree.

I heard the phrase "pay it forward" for the first time only recently. We can't pay back all the package maintainers, translators, the people who pushed for our local school to use free software, but we can make our own contribution which we won't get paid back for, and that cancels out some of our debt.

Heartfelt thanks

Posted Jul 9, 2015 10:52 UTC (Thu) by keeperofdakeys (subscriber, #82635) [Link]

If you haven't noticed, mplayer2 development has not happened for a number of years now. There is another fork called mpv which is actively maintained, and is taking it in a bit of a different direction. Just be sure to check the version in your repo is uptodate.

Heartfelt thanks

Posted Jul 9, 2015 16:21 UTC (Thu) by flussence (subscriber, #85566) [Link]

+1 to mpv. I've used many, many different media player frontends in the past 10-15 years and it's probably the most polished one of the lot.

Heartfelt thanks

Posted Jul 9, 2015 18:28 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

Thank you, I had not heard of mpv. Maybe it should be "suggested" in the mplayer and mplayer2 packages?

Heartfelt thanks

Posted Jul 9, 2015 20:41 UTC (Thu) by patrakov (subscriber, #97174) [Link]

Well, the Debian Policy defines a precise meaning for the word "suggests" as used in the control file, and your proposal doesn't fit it.

https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-relationships...

Heartfelt thanks

Posted Jul 10, 2015 4:06 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

It also has very nice C code (up there with tmux if you've looked into it). It is one of the few projects I skim commit logs on a fairly regular basis.

The integration with youtube-dl is great; no need to download the things anymore since you can just play the URL directly.

Heartfelt thanks

Posted Jul 14, 2015 1:52 UTC (Tue) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link]

mpv beats both mplayer and mplayer2 for me.

Heartfelt thanks

Posted Jul 14, 2015 4:59 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Agreed. It would be good to have an article about it on LWN. I'll have to ask wm4 (maybe even write one myself?).

Heartfelt thanks

Posted Jul 14, 2015 5:11 UTC (Tue) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link]

There doesn't appear to be a pre-built mpv for my distro. I don't mind building from source but it would be nice to know first that it will be worth the effort. I have one question in particular:

The summary info for mpv indicates that it dropped support for the mode that mplayer called dvdnav:// So far as I know this was the only way to deal with some commercial dvds that hid the track structure in the menu somehow. Does anyone know if mpv has a different way to deal with these?

Heartfelt thanks

Posted Jul 14, 2015 7:25 UTC (Tue) by dlang (subscriber, #313) [Link]

I know that both mplayer2 and mpv have dropped support for tivo mpeg2 transport stream files, so i keep mplayer around.

Heartfelt thanks

Posted Jul 14, 2015 12:45 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

The dvdnav code, IIRC, was fraught with problems (bad alignment of selection and click areas). You might be able to resurrect the code if stuff is cleaned up as well. You could ask about it on IRC too.

Heartfelt thanks

Posted Jul 14, 2015 13:55 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

See: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/commit/3b3170aedb4c8a9b...

Heartfelt thanks

Posted Jul 15, 2015 18:53 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Indeed. I was put off for a long time because no frontends supported it (it sensibly dropped compatibility with the terrible ASCII-parsing method that was all mplayer and other descendants supported for frontend automation). However, it implemented a better automation method, and as of a while back smplayer supports it :) so it has a very good frontend now.