[FFmpeg-devel] What is the relationship between wmv1, wmv2 and wmv3 and msmpeg4?

[Vitor Sessak]

Hello, and please do not top-post.

zhihang wang wrote:
> It is no doubt that I add the AVS encoder to the ffmpeg project.
> But because of so much work I should do and considering the updating of
> ffmpeg every day, I can't make sure I can follow
> the ffmpeg project.

FFmpeg is _very_ modular. I do not see why some code adding a new 
encoder (which would only touch a couple of files) would break with the 
changes. You would only need to worry with changes to the files related 
with your encoder, what should not change that often.

> So I make another project and named it ffavs. The licence is not changed.

The technical name of it is doing a "fork".

> The main advantage of ffavs compared to ffmpeg I claimed on my website is
> the GOAL of my work.

Quoting your website:

> It's main goal is to provide a TRUE and High Efficient transcoding library. 

While it is not clear to me what you mean by "TRUE", FFmpeg certainly 
has the goal of been high efficient (to the point of been paranoid with 
performance).

Also, quoting your website:

> The main advantage of FFavs compared to FFmpeg is:
> 1. The program code is cleaner.
> 2. The transcoding efficiency is Higher. 

If you have a patch that makes FFmpeg code cleaner or faster or more 
high quality, it is very welcome in the main tree, there is no need of 
forking for that.

> You can find these great changes from the git repository.

I've given a look at your GIT repo. A good part of the changes consist of:

1- Changing indentation from 4 spaces to 2 spaces (it is a matter of 
taste, but for the main branch we settled it to 4 spaces quite some time 
ago and most devs like it this way)
2- Changing indentation/var name for a different taste
3- Rebranding: s/FFmpeg/FFavs/
4- Cosmetics (assignment alignment mostly)
5- Some funny copy-and-pasting of mpeg code

Again, if any of these changes (I've not looked at all of them) does 
make FFmpeg code cleaner in a way that do not duplicate code nor is just 
a matter of taste (an example of a different taste is renaming AVCodec 
to av_codec_t), it should probably be welcome. Also anything that makes 
FFmpeg measurably faster is also welcome.

-Vitor