[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH] Dynamic plugins loading

[Ramiro Polla]

On Sun, Oct 31, 2010 at 10:52 PM, Ronald S. Bultje <rsbultje at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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?

I agree with Ronald.

We had something similar (vhooks) and dropped it.

Ramiro Polla