FFmpeg back in Debian

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in code on (#2T0R)
More than 3 years ago, January 2011, ffmpeg was forked by a part of the development team into libav. Then, by the end of that year, the fork had replaced FFmpeg in Debian's packages, with, notably, the binary in the ffmpeg package marking itself as deprecated and recommending users to use avconv instead. As the split didn't happen in the most friendly way (to say the least), these events sparkled a lot of debates and flames and it is quite difficult to find articles on the topic that are not biased one way or the other.

In November 2013, a bug report was filed for Debian to reintroduce an actual ffmpeg package and all the associated libraries. Fast forward to mid-September 2014, after some technical discussions and soname changes (all ffmpeg-related libraries with a libav* name have been renamed into libav*-ffmpeg), ffmpeg has been quietly reintroduced in Debian unstable and it might even be just in time to be included for release in Jessie.

Let's hope this solution where both versions can co-exist will help calm things down.

Re: Debian is a dying project. (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-10-01 18:14 (#2T1M)

Don't forget Slackware...it's like Gentoo in that it doesn't have systemd, but it's NOT like Gentoo in that you don't have to compile EVERYTHING from source.

And as a plus, Slackware doesn't even waste repository space supporting Gnome, and hasn't for a few versions. What seemed like a weird move at the time has shown Volk to be a bit of a visionary...

I am a little more confused with the Mozilla side of things. While they've gotten a little cocky, they still have a ways to go before it's nearly as bad as Chrome to those who have solid reasons for using Firefox in the first place. The real threat they face is folks like Pale Moon and company making a better Firefox than Firefox. Can't say I've seen good reason to switch though...any change they've made I didn't like I configured away with extensions, and that degree of configuration and extension support is precisely why I've been a Firefox user for years in the first place. Webkit will need some pretty serious enhancements it they hope to ever take the seat of my primary browser...
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