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

[Richard Ash]

On Tue, 20 May 2014 23:41:53 +0200
Benjamin Drung <bdrung at debian.org> wrote:

> > > 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.
> 
> Are there really codecs that are supported by Gstreamer, but not by
> FFmpeg?

Probably not (other than transiently). But there are some which
Audacity doesn't have, and which not a patent risk (e.g. Ogg Opus).
currently, anyone concerned about (for example) AAC patents has problems
getting Ogg Opus. There has also been a patent licensed MP3 encoder for
Gstreamer in the past (aimed at corporate users) and there is active
work to expose the GPU on the raspberry pi as gstreamer component
(making hardware acceleration possible).

So it's not just about absolute codec range, but also pick and choose
flexibility.

I think I found why it didn't work for me - I seem to have been running
the wrong binary, not the one I was compiling.

Richard