[FFmpeg-devel] [RFC] AVFilter

[Devin Heitmueller]

On Tue, Oct 15, 2024 at 12:12 PM Michael Niedermayer
<michael at niedermayer.cc> wrote:
>
> Hi all
>
> This is a quick RFC about peoples oppinions on AVFilter
>
> The question: Should anyone be able to write a filter (which
> other people can use) ?
> Or should only we be able to add filters ?

For what it's worth, I pretty much assumed that filters could only be
done in-tree, in particular after the avfilter_register() APIs were
removed a few years ago.

Personally I would really like to be able to maintain certain filters
in a separate git tree and be able to compile them against libavfilter
and add them in at runtime.  This isn't because of anything to do with
licensing (my entire ffmpeg tree is already public on github), but
simply these are filters which do stuff I strongly believe nobody else
would care about or wouldn't be accepted upstream for any number of
reasons.  Keeping my filters outside the main ffmpeg tree makes it
easier to rebase against newer versions of the ffmpeg libraries.

Now I realize this increases the maintenance burden in some cases, as
it means the APIs are public and hence there are issues with
maintaining backward compatibility.  And since I'm not the one who is
doing that work it wouldn't be appropriate for me to say, "it's worth
it".  But as a user of the libraries I will say it would indeed be
very nice if I could have out-of-tree filters.

Devin

-- 
Devin Heitmueller, Senior Software Engineer
LTN Global Communications
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