[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH] Dynamic plugins loading

[Ronald S. Bultje]

Hi,

On Sun, Oct 31, 2010 at 9:42 AM, Nicolas George
<nicolas.george at normalesup.org> wrote:
> There is probably much to discuss, but at the very least, it works to simply
> add support for a new format in lavf by just dropping a file in a directory.
> Codecs and filters should work just the same.

Let's just go over the big phat elephant in the room. Is this an advantage?

I used to think this kind of stuff was good. But is there really an
advantage to all this? I can think of disadvantages:
- no strong license enforcement because you can separate shipping of
software pieces that have strictly incompatible licenses
- security becomes worthless, any plugin can exploit a system
- stability becomes a nightmare as soon as you start thinking about
possibly updating ABI/API
- dynamic plugins won't share code with the main source tree, which
means that the best point of FFmpeg - fast and lean - no longer
applies
- companies can suddenly get away with releasing a binary plus FFmpeg
wrapper code. This is _bad_. We don't want to promote this kind of
silliness in any way

If people want a massive, slow, insecure licensing headache that has
something to do with multimedia, they can install one of the many
"multimedia frameworks" that were created to """solve""" this problem.
Right?

Ronald