why libva over ffmpeg

[Andres Cimmarusti]

Mmm. Forgive me for pressing the issue, why did Debian chose libva
over ffmpeg? I've read the "history" behind the libva fork. It seems
one of the main issues was that to get patches and/or features into
ffmpeg was very very hard. They had to be the perfect solution or they
would otherwise be rejected by the project leader. It feels
counter-intuitive now, with the fork, that they release less often...
meaning less features...

Don't get me wrong, from what I've read, I side more with the stance
of the libva developers, but Debian has always been very pragmatic
about many of its decisions.

> To be honest, I also begin to wonder more and more. Sure, version numbers are all hollow words, but it appears to me that the original ffmpeg project is more vital than its fork - at least in term of releases.

I agree version numbers mean nothing, but what about number of
features? I'm not well versed in the many uses of ffmpeg/libav, so
when reading the changelogs between versions I get no feeling for how
their features compare. I'm asking the mailing list for this.

In any case, why has the name ffmpeg been kept?, shouldn't it all
renamed to libav? (I'm aware some of the packages are already).

I understand the debian multimedia maintainers is probably a group
composed mainly of volunteers, and thus have very limited time, but
have you consider packaging both ffmpeg and libav? and give the user
the freedom to choose?

Thanks for your time

Andres