[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH] Dynamic plugins loading

[Felipe Contreras]

On Mon, Nov 1, 2010 at 2:52 AM, 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?

Of course it is is!

There is a need to package separately free, and patent encumbered
codecs. Right now that's impossible with FFmpeg, and that's the reason
it's not offered on Fedora, or MeeGo.

This is solved in GStreamer by having a separate package for the core,
and the patent encumbered plugins. The third party repo provides the
codec packages that get installed into /usr/lib/gstreamer-0.10, and
voil?, you have support for all the codecs. There's even on-the-fly
codec installation support so when trying to play a clip, you get
asked if you want to install the codec package.

Personally I think it's a shame that FFmpeg is not shipped in such
important distributions just because of this reason. And of course if
your package depends on FFmpeg, then you are out of the distro as
well.

-- 
Felipe Contreras