

FFmpeg Developers Just Forked As Libav - dreur
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTIwNw

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mckoss
In the age of git and hg, why is a fork such a big deal? Code can still flow
fluidly between multiple forks of a project with almost no friction. Some
amount of forking is probably healthy in the long run, allowing a different
part of the community to take the lead and head in their own direction.

In the extreme, if everyone works on an independent fork, and never merges, we
lose the benefits of building "team-sized" projects. But that does not seem
what is happening here.

~~~
danudey
The friction isn't in the movement of code, it's in the movement of ideas and
prioritization. Adding functionality, cleaning up the code, etc. When a
project's contributors disagree substantially on how a project should be run,
where the priorities should be, etc. then there can be a significant amount of
friction just in day to day operations (like communicating about ideas on the
mailing list).

Perhaps some of the fixes from libav can be brought back into ffmpeg, but
eventually people will want to standardize on one or the other, and if the
libav folks are splitting off because they want improvement, revitalization,
etc. and the old guard doesn't, then I suspect people will move to libav
instead.

Similar issues happened in the past with xorg (where XFree86 was mismanaged
and eventually the community had enough and decided to fork it and fix it) and
with KHTML/WebKit (where Apple forked it and made so many improvements to it
that WebCore/JavaScriptCore have replaced KHTML in most (all?) projects
(including Qt). That split wasn't a philosophical/managerial split, mind you,
but the end result was the same.

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xentronium
This guys are horrible with names. Come on, libav, REALLY?

~~~
Locke1689
Seems to make sense to me. "Library audio/visual." If you're preparing to use
libav/libavcodec and expect it to be user-friendly this is the least of your
problems.

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bkaid
FFmpeg has to be the best example of OSS done wrong. While it is incredibly
powerful in what it can do and is overall a great project, it is crazy
difficult to get it to build right, documentation of anything is scattered
across newsgroups, the developers are always having arguments like this
lately, and the API has breaking changes all the time, including completely
removing functionality without any sort of replacement.

~~~
Locke1689
There is a fair bit a developer churn, the project doesn't have very strong
leadership, and the source code is messier than it should be.

Let's just say my experience was less than perfect. Add to that language
barriers and it is just a very hard project to work for.

Of course, projects like VLC and mplayer still get a lot of the credit for the
hard work that FFmpeg is mostly responsible for.

~~~
bkaid
And the countless crappy paid windows video converter apps that don't credit
FFMpeg and all they do is do shell out to ffmpeg. I get a chuckle out of the
the FFMpeg wall of shame (which is honestly smaller than it should be):
<http://www.ffmpeg.org/shame.html>

~~~
Locke1689
I'm almost more OK with that than the VLC people. It's not that I have
anything against VLC, but they recently did an AMA on Reddit and it kind of
rubbed me the wrong way. The primary thing the VLC team gets credit for is
being able to play pretty much anything you throw at it, but that's the
product of a lot of DSP work that me and mostly a ton of other people a lot
more talented than me did. If VLC came out and said "we make graphics
frontends and command line options" that would be one thing, but there was a
trend to accept the praise without coming out and saying that they weren't
responsible for most of the work. It was especially frustrating for me because
I actually dislike a lot of the UI/UX decisions that VLC made, which was their
primary contribution to the media player.

I understand it when unscrupulous people rip off FFmpeg, but I had hoped there
would be more honor among fellow OSS developers.

~~~
jbk
Please, stop spreading FUD.

First, we didn't do an AMA on Reddit.

Then, the UI/UX part of VLC is around 1/30th of the VLC codebase (not counting
external libraries) and most of the code is demuxers, decoders, protocol
handlers (all custom), video outputs, video filter, clock, audio filters and
libraries wrapper (not only libavcodec).

Did you actually look at the codebase before saying things like this?

Then, VLC developers have worked on libavcodec, like for DxVA2 acceleration,
and have been telling people to add codecs inside libavcodec, and not directly
VLC.

> there was a trend to accept the praise without coming out

Where did you see that "trend" ?

Finally, I don't see what your work is on FFmpeg or other such libraries.

~~~
Locke1689
Edit: You know what, just disregard my first comment. It's mostly me being
bitter and isn't productive at all. The solution is to have the projects work
better together, not whine about who deserves the most credit.

I apologize, you're right. I actually went back to look at it and it was all
non-VLC people misrepresenting FFmpeg and VLC.

 _Then, the UI/UX part of VLC is around 1/30th of the VLC codebase (not
counting external libraries) and most of the code is demuxers, decoders,
protocol handlers (all custom), video outputs, video filter, clock, audio
filters and libraries wrapper (not only libavcodec)._

I didn't mean to say that VLC doesn't do anything important, I just felt that
FFmpeg gets less credit than it deserves because it is less user-facing.

As to the codebase and FFMpeg contributions: I actually have a patch sitting
around that makes substantial bug fixes and improvements to the OS X VLC. Part
of this was a result of my work in FFMpeg improving crash and corruption
resilience. I wouldn't have worked on this if I didn't feel that VLC is a good
project, so I apologize if you thought my comment misrepresented the project
or the developers. It was simply meant to express a general frustration at the
lack of recognition of FFMpeg developers.

~~~
jbk
Apologies accepted :D

We've tried to give more FFmpeg visibility, by adding badges to ffmpeg.org
from our website (but this is on hold, because of the fork and the logo
dispute), and we've reworked our about:box to show it more...

But, the truth is that the actual reason we want to find a business model for
VLC is that we want to pay FFmpeg developers to work on FFmpeg.

If you have patches for VLC on OSX, please share, we need help on the OSX
version of VLC.

~~~
Locke1689
_If you have patches for VLC on OSX, please share, we need help on the OSX
version of VLC._

It's complicated, but I'll try to talk with you out-of-band on this soon.
Lately it seems like I have out of date patches just piling up all over my
system for every project under the sun.

