[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH] Add WebM to the Matroska demuxer name

[Reimar Döffinger]

On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 04:57:40PM -0400, Alex Converse wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 4:30 PM, Reimar D?ffinger
> <Reimar.Doeffinger at gmx.de> wrote:
> > On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 04:10:29PM -0400, Alex Converse wrote:
> >> So am I going to wind up burying this patch because we can't agree on
> >> what the ideal libavformat API should be?
> >>
> >> What's making me irritated here is the patch is not being held up
> >> because it is broken but because people dislike the established
> >> interfaces.
> >
> > It is "broken" in so far as it _will_ break MPlayer, MPlayer
> > uses the short name to decide whether to accept or reject an
> > autodetection (since for some formats the lavf demuxers
> > are not working well enough).
> > This may not have been the intended use, but it seems likely
> > to me other applications may have misused it in similar ways,
> > since I am not aware of any other way to uniquely identify a
> > _given_ AVInputFormat.
> 
> Under the current ABI it is a comma separated list that is allowed to
> grow (though It grows quite infrequently). It seems like doing it the
> right way is possible under the current ABI (all you would have to do
> is compare the first name up until the first comma or NUL). Perhaps
> you can enlighten us on why mplayer feels it necessary to do it the
> way it does.

Probably for the same reason that av_guess_format does that?
"Nobody" knows that the name isn't actually a name, but a comma-separated
list of names and you'd have to parse them, which is not _quite_ as
simple as your description sounds.
Particularly since so far there is nothing that would allow me to assume
that the order stays the same, is there?

> Furthermore if you have a problem with a libavformat demuxer why not
> fix it rather than maintain your own set of demuxers only for mplayer
> that other players can't share.

Because my time is not unlimited? Sorry, but that question is about as stupid
as asking "why don't you just fix all FFmpeg bugs?".
Or did you fail to notice that I _have_ been fixing quite a few issues
in order to get there?
Not to mention the issues I can't do anything about, like the lavf mpegts
demuxer patch to support LATM being refused because it breaks things with
libavcodec?