[FFmpeg-devel] Deprecation of visual output devices

wm4 nfxjfg at googlemail.com
Wed Sep 27 18:01:59 EEST 2017


On Wed, 27 Sep 2017 16:34:49 +0200
Michael Niedermayer <michael at niedermayer.cc> wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 27, 2017 at 02:18:13PM +0100, Josh de Kock wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > There is no point of having these output devices as all the
> > functionality is contained in the 'ffplay' tool. If people wanted to
> > integrate these devices in their own programs instead of using the
> > ffmpeg tool then they are far too constrained for proper control, not to  
> 
> > mention output devices have been quick hacky in libavdevice for a long  
> 
> then please write a better API / lib / system

It should never have been added this way. Why did it happen? On that
note, I tried to prevent it, and to argue that the contributor should
have created a better API instead of badly hacking it into libavdevice.

Why do you suddenly think there is a strong argument for keeping it?

> > time. There are three patches attached to deprecate the SDL2, OpenGL,
> > and libcaca devices.  
> 
> Once a better system exists with these features this can be deprecated.

> requiring each user application to directly support each API of each
> of these systems is very inconvenient for all but the large applications

There are entire frameworks for abstracting these things. libavdevice
is one of them, but only as a joke.

> Indeed the large applications benefit from the absence of a single API
> as they eliminate competition from smaller apps which are unable to
> maintain support for a wide range of output devices.
> 
> I think a good API that supports a wide range of in/out devices would
> be very usefull for smaller/simpler applications using the libs

Name a user of these APIs.

Your argumentation is full of fallacies. We don't actually do any of
those things for applications. As far as I'm aware, only the person who
added this API is even using it. Are you even aware that ffplay doesn't
use this API?

I'm sick of this attitude to keep bad/broken stuff just so that we
"have it". Supporting a feature is meaningless if it's low quality.
Maybe one day you will learn this.

I can't way for the day libavdevice or libavfilter will grow a UI
toolkit.


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