[FFmpeg-devel] Read this if you are porting filters from MPlayer

[Michael Niedermayer]

Hi everyone

Its great to see all the porting effort.
Its less great that the quality of alot of that is kinda uhm...
Ive the feeling people just want to, at any price change the existing code in
ways totally unrelated to porting. Dont do it, dont even think of doing it!
It costs you time to do, it costs me time to review and benchmark the changes
and with 99% chance if you didnt benchmark. your change will be to the worse
(thats unless your name is jason, loren, fabrice, arpi and a few others)
and you will have to painfully undo it. Because i will benchmark your filter
and if mplayers original is faster even by just 1% you get a 1 line
"rejected its slower" comment and you can then find out where you messed up
Similarly if theres some feature dissappearance like geqs ability to read
from arbitrary pixels disappearing.

There have been man-years of optimization and debuging thrown into mplayers
filters. If you feel like throwing that away and playing NIH then i suggest you
rather play russian roulett. That at least doesnt waste precious review time.

Porting is one thing, and is easy to review and get approved.
Changes to the code are another thing and also easy to get approved if they
are to the better.
But mix them and review becomes hard because its no longer clear what has
been changed for porting and what because the author felt an itch about
something.
Also consider to diff your code against mplayers before submitting. Iam going
to compare it no matter how its posted and i will find changes and make
sarcastic comments about them if they are completely brain amputated


-- 
Michael     GnuPG fingerprint: 9FF2128B147EF6730BADF133611EC787040B0FAB

In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.
-- Diogenes of Sinope
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