[FFmpeg-user] Libav (Avconv) Imposition on Users who want FFmpeg

[Dainius (GreatEmerald)]

I haven't read your post on the forum (as it's still down), but if
it's only about the virtual, then it's confusing, yes, but not really
something they can do much about. Now firstly you are not supposed to
install virtuals by themselves, it's just a virtual package that
others could depend on (depending on virtual/ffmpeg means that the
program doesn't care about whether it's FFmpeg or Libav that is behind
/usr/bin/ffmpeg). The reason why it's called "ffmpeg" is because
FFmpeg was first, and thus everyone depends on a binary of that name.
I'm not sure to what else it could be renamed.

Whether the virtual prefers one over the other I'm not really sure.
The ebuild for virtual/ffmpeg-0.10.3 lists media-video/ffmpeg first,
while virtual/ffmpeg-9 lists media-video/libav first (and the
numbering seems to prefer Libav's versioning). The current stabilised
version is virtual/ffmpeg-0.10.3. Overall dealing with virtuals in
Gentoo is kind of a pain since there is no easy way to specify what
you want it to use under the hood, with the best way to do that is to
pre-emptively install one of the packages the virtual depends on.

If the virtual does now prefer Libav, then it's rather unfortunate,
but I'd rather hear both sides of the argument for that change.
Personally I don't see why they would do that, as FFmpeg being the
superset naturally provides more and there are programs that depend
specifically on FFmpeg (I haven't heard any that specifically depend
on Libav).

Well, that said, there is a bit of a problem in that regard with
GStreamer. GStreamer 1.X only officially supports Libav for some
reason (I think it's because they want to support both and thus opt
for the smaller feature set), and thus when installing it with FFmpeg
Portage outputs a warning. There are also some reported bugs against
GStreamer when using FFmpeg, but then it will probably be fixed in
GStreamer 1.4:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=721077#c24