Re: [xine-devel] [RFC] Removing internal copy of FFmpeg?

[<fla...@gm...>]

Bill Fink <bil...@mi...> writes:

> That said, from the user perspective, I found it a strong selling
> point of xine that it had a guiding principle of being self-contained
> for doing its basic core functionality.

Uh, like having a frontend? Building two packages or building three
shouldn't really change one's life that much.

And yes, Fedora does not have any FFmpeg package, but that's mostly a
Fedora problem ;)

Building FFmpeg nowadays is quite trivial, and as I said, I'd be adding
a proper guide on how to build your own FFmpeg if users don't know how
to do that.


> Also, I thought there were a number of xine internal patches to
> ffmpeg that are carried along with xine, and that haven't been
> merged back upstream to mainline ffmpeg for some reason.

No more; in 1.2 series there is no patch to FFmpeg which isn't applied
upstream, and I've been using external FFmpeg for xine-lib in Gentoo for
the best part of two years without problems. As I said before, Debian
and Ubuntu also do this, and probably other distributions too.

The big load of patches that we apply on FFmpeg on 1.1 series is to get
it to work with automake as buildsystem, and of course those patches
will never be accepted by FFmpeg itself. For this reason on 1.2 I've
already changed the buildsystem to use FFmpeg's own buildsystem instead.

> On the plus side, I guess we could get new capabilities faster, but
> it could also make troubleshooting problems somewhat harder as there
> could be a variety of different ffmpeg versions being used with a
> variety of xine versions.

This is true already today, as I said above; but distributions don't
seem to be having much trouble with this. Actually, there are even bugs
that are _solved_ by using external FFmpeg, like the green squares on
H.264 video.

As I said, making FFmpeg external mandatory makes it possible to use
more lightheartly libavutil in other plugins (as it will be loaded
shared rather than being linked statically), and in frontends (xine-ui
has at least a couple of uses for it).

And if Fedora is so much difficult to get xine on, it would be worth to
have someone preparing an unofficial (for Fedora) but official (for us)
packages repository to have libxine, FFmpeg, and so on.

=2D-=20
Diego "Flameeyes" Petten=C3=B2
http://farragut.flameeyes.is-a-geek.org/