[Libav-user] [Audacity-devel] Requesting help to port Audacity to recent FFmpeg

[Richard Ash]

On Wed, 14 May 2014 19:27:38 +0200
Michael Niedermayer <michaelni at gmx.at> wrote:
> On Sun, May 11, 2014 at 09:16:29PM +0200, Benjamin Drung wrote:
> > That's why I send this mail to this mailing list to request help. Is
> > there anyone who has the time and skill to help porting Audacity to
> > the latest FFmpeg API version?
> > 
> > [1] http://bugzilla.audacityteam.org/show_bug.cgi?id=606

I think I'm right in saying that no-one on the audacity-devel list was
specifically aware of this work/request (or I might have said something
earlier).

As a result of this problem, one of the Audacity contributors, Leyland
Lucius, has been perusing the use of Gstreamer as an abstraction layer
for ffmpeg. This work has recently arrived in Audacity SVN, so you
should be able to see where it is at (it isn't working for me, but I
don't think it's Leyland's fault).

The rationale for doing this is that the Gstreamer 1.0 API is much more
stable than the libAV one, and there is an (actively maintained)
gst-plugin-libav which provides the functionality of libAV through that
API. Thus the problem of providing up-to-date builds of libAV is
reduced, and an abstraction layer is provided.

This also has the benefit of allowing (in principal) any other codecs
which are supported in Gstreamer (or by plugins for it) to be added to
Audacity relatively easily. This is something we hope to make modular,
so that it doesn't need a complete new build of audacity to use new
gstreamer plug-ins, and every download of Audacity doesn't have to ship
with every possible codec library.



Richard