[FFmpeg-devel] Read this if you are porting filters from MPlayer

Jason Garrett-Glaser jason
Fri Dec 3 02:58:26 CET 2010


On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 4:52 PM, Michael Niedermayer <michaelni at gmx.at> wrote:
> Hi everyone
>
> Its great to see all the porting effort.
> Its less great that the quality of alot of that is kinda uhm...
> Ive the feeling people just want to, at any price change the existing code in
> ways totally unrelated to porting. Dont do it, dont even think of doing it!
> It costs you time to do, it costs me time to review and benchmark the changes
> and with 99% chance if you didnt benchmark. your change will be to the worse
> (thats unless your name is jason, loren, fabrice, arpi and a few others)
> and you will have to painfully undo it. Because i will benchmark your filter
> and if mplayers original is faster even by just 1% you get a 1 line
> "rejected its slower" comment and you can then find out where you messed up
> Similarly if theres some feature dissappearance like geqs ability to read
> from arbitrary pixels disappearing.
>
> There have been man-years of optimization and debuging thrown into mplayers
> filters. If you feel like throwing that away and playing NIH then i suggest you
> rather play russian roulett. That at least doesnt waste precious review time.
>
> Porting is one thing, and is easy to review and get approved.
> Changes to the code are another thing and also easy to get approved if they
> are to the better.
> But mix them and review becomes hard because its no longer clear what has
> been changed for porting and what because the author felt an itch about
> something.
> Also consider to diff your code against mplayers before submitting. Iam going
> to compare it no matter how its posted and i will find changes and make
> sarcastic comments about them if they are completely brain amputated
>
>

You should not be so harsh on high school students... this is not
Google Summer of Code, this is Google Code-In.  Most of them neither
have the time, nor the skill; nor the sanity, to deal with this level
of nitpicks.

I am doing my best to try to recruit new blood to the project; don't
scare them away.

Jason



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