[FFmpeg-devel] Project orientation

[Marton Balint]

On Sun, 5 Jul 2020, Kieran Kunhya wrote:

>>>> Would you want something experimental like x262 to be part of the
>> > FFmpeg codebase, for us to have to maintain forever? If you don't limit
>> > scope then that is what would happen.
>>
>> x262 is another example of a fork, where the fork alone was not
>> popular/interesting enough to live on. If it were merged to x264, I am
>> fairly certain it would not be experimental anymore, and we'd have an
>> MPEG2 encoder which would scale much better to multiple cores than what we
>> have now in ffmpeg.
>>
>
> Highly unlikely, x264 development has essentially ground to a halt. And
> people use H.264 a lot still.
> x262 works well enough for an old format like MPEG-2. There's no real need
> to develop it unless someone needs to eke out an extra 2% compression
> because they have a million MPEG-2 receivers they can't change.

x264 is practically feature complete, but x262 still miss some things, 
like 4:2:2 interlaced. Sure, x262 can work well enough for some use cases, 
but it is still not packaged in e.g. Ubuntu, so users are stuck with the 
- in some ways - inferior mpeg2 encoder of ffmpeg.

The point I am trying to make is that you and some other people made a 
fast and modern mpeg2 encoder, in some ways superior to existing open 
source alternatives, but very few people is using it because it was not 
merged to a bigger/more popular project like x264 or ffmpeg. So it 
receives no mainteance, no distribution support, no user base and 
ultimately no further development. Or at least that is how I see it.

Regards,
Marton

>
> The original x264 developers didn't want a merge back by the way.
>
> And I'd also like to point to the linux kernel as an example of a
>> monolitic code repository which seems to work quite well.
>>
>
> Exception that proves the rule. A lot of developers there are paid full
> time to work on the kernel and just do cleanup, merge old patches etc.
>
> Kieran
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