[FFmpeg-devel] [RFC] 5 year plan & Inovation

[Stefano Sabatini]

On date Wednesday 2024-04-17 15:58:32 +0200, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> Hi all
> 
> The pace of inovation in FFmpeg has been slowing down.
> Most work is concentarted nowadays on code refactoring, and adding
> support for new codecs and formats.
> 
> Should we
> * make a list of longer term goals
> * vote on them
> * and then together work towards implementing them
> ?
> 
> (The idea here is to increase the success of larger efforts
>  than adding codecs and refactoring code)
> It would then also not be possible for individuals to object
> to a previously agreed goal.
> And it would add ideas for which we can try to get funding/grants for
> 
> (larger scale changes need consensus first that we as a whole want
>  them before we would be able to ask for funding/grants for them)
> 
> Some ideas and why they would help FFmpeg:
> 
[...]
> * client side / in browser support
>     (expand towards webapps, webpages using ffmpeg client side in the browser)
>     bring in more users and developers, and it will be costly for us
>     if we let others take this area as its important and significant

There are already several projects on github, the most prominent one:
https://github.com/ffmpegwasm/ffmpeg.wasm/

In general it would be useful to provide libav* bindings to other
languages, for example:
https://github.com/PyAV-Org/PyAV
https://github.com/zmwangx/rust-ffmpeg

Not sure these should be really moved to FFmpeg though.

One option I'm currenly exploring is having a python filter enabling
to specify a custom filter implemented in python (needed for custom
ad-hoc logic you don't really want to implement in C since it's not
generic enough) and to enable using python modules when effiency is
not an issue.