[Ffmpeg-devel] Using ffmpeg libs in an OSS project is a nightmare

[Dave Airlie]

> I think then you really didn't get how Fmpeg and MPlayer development
> works. All CVS snapshots are supposed to be in that state, and at
> least 90% of the time they actually are.
> It really looks to me like you didn't really try to find a solution to
> your problem yourself and instead expect the people here to implement
> your ideas.

I don't really have a major issue, I've forked my codebase internally
for a project a long time ago, its just to think about doing a resync
it would be nice to have a clue when the project is in the 10% phase
and when the project is in the 90% phase and again I say the only
people who actually know this are the developers, I can lurk on lists
and CVS commits all I want but I don't have an in-depth knowledge to
know what changes might be stabilising and what ones might be
destabilising.. my thoughts are that if developers could maybe expend
a little extra work to say, well we think this should be stable, lets
give it a number, it would maybe save other developers on other
projects all wasting a large amount of time figuring it our for
themselves...  I don't expect anyone to implement anything, I'm just
trying to figure out why the project is very anti- it, unlike most
others I've work on...

> I'm sorry, I prefer Micheal and all the others working on better codec
> support instead of caring about API stability and documentation - if
> that is important to enough people, IMHO it should be possible to find
> somebody who does it.

I haven't mentioned stability or documentation, the idea being put
forward was just to do some baseline releases that people could
synchronize off, I'll give you an example,

I've got my great new project called helloworld that uses ffmpeg, I
forked way back at 0.4.8, I now want to update my fork with the latest
codeset from ffmpeg, I've no idea what the current state of the tree
is, so I grab CVS HEAD and import it and suddenly my MPEG4 movies are
all jerky and don't play smoothly, now currently I'd have to go on a
binary search through CVS tarballs never knowing if a particular
tarball was in anyway stable or going to introduce some other
wierdness. fixing up my APIs as I went. if there was "stable" drops
i.e. the developers felt it was good at that time, then I could just
start picking my way through them at least knowing I wasn't going to
end up in the middle of some construction work...

I think there are people who care about this out there (otherwise you
wouldn't get the constant trolling...) maybe this will provoke them
into it, but it still requires buy-in from the developers and if they
really don't want it to happen, theres no point anyone standing up to
volunteer to do it .. and if they do want it to happen I don't
actually think it is that much work in any case... I certainly ain't
volunteering, my maintainance to hacking ratio on open source projects
is already leaning far too much on the maintainance side...but perhaps
if people from many of the ffmpeg using projects got together one
person might decide it is worth it...

Dave.