[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH 3/3] lavc: remove Libav ABI compat hacks

[Ronald S. Bultje]

Hi,

On Sun, Sep 6, 2015 at 8:46 AM, Carl Eugen Hoyos <cehoyos at ag.or.at> wrote:

> Ronald S. Bultje <rsbultje <at> gmail.com> writes:
>
> > Are there users that care about this feature?
>
> > Why didn't they complain that it didn't work?
>
> Why do you think it doesn't work?


 "(Just for reference, I tested running avconv's FATE with FFmpeg's
libraries:
a lot of tests fail, without surprise (the libraries do not behave the same,
that is the whole point; and apparently avconv thinks that EOF is a
filtering error), but quite a few succeed, and I have not seen crashes. That
means the compatibility is pretty good right now.)"

I want you to imagine for a second that a user downloads one of these UIs
that is essentially ffmpeg.exe or avconv.exe with some extras, and tries to
use it, and sees a user-equivalent of the above. Media files don't load,
colors display incorrectly, you keep getting error dialogs telling you that
something has gone wrong, with specifics that nobody really understands,
with "unknown error" or "invalid argument" in the "details" section. The
about box says that this software uses FFmpeg version a.b.c with libavcodec
x.y.z.

To be fair, it might not crash, and from a technical perspective, maybe
compatibility _is_ actually not terrible, depending on how you measure it.
But it doesn't work from a user perspective.

Ronald