FFmpeg back in Debian

by
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: 3, Insightful)

by skarjak@pipedot.org on 2014-10-02 13:47 (#2T28)

It would possibly be +5 on slashdot because it really appeals to the hivemind there. It is -1 here because the comment is simply wrong. It might be nice to think those companies you think have slighted you are now "dying", but they are all doing pretty well right now. The parent was just a self-righteous rant. More to the point, the companies named generally made changes with the intention of making themselves more appealing to certain users. That is not "crapping on their users" as was incorrectly claimed.

If not automatically +1'ing every thing that appeals to the internet hivemind bothers you, then this is no big loss to pipedot.
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