[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH] Dynamic plugins loading

[Felipe Contreras]

On Tue, Nov 2, 2010 at 3:28 PM, Luca Barbato <lu_zero at gentoo.org> wrote:
> On 11/2/10 1:23 PM, Felipe Contreras wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>
> That is a stupid excuse as pointed by ubuntu.

Is it? Say Fedora provides ffmpeg-free-0.6, rpmfusion provides
ffmpeg-all-0.6, presumably making sure it obsoletes ffmpeg-free, that
might work. But then ffmpeg-free-0.7 is released, and there's ABI
breakage so applications are updated at the same time, but now updates
are blocked, because of ffmpeg-all-0.6.

This looks like it would be a package maintenance hell.

>> 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.
>
> What about having multiple libavcodec and just switch one with the other?

How? Having two separate packages? I don't think that would fly on
many distributions.

>> 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.
>
> Not our fault.

According to you.

-- 
Felipe Contreras