Bug#655683: libav-tools: should provide ff* compatibility symlinks

[Rogério Brito]

Hi there.

On Jan 13 2012, Reinhard Tartler wrote:
> Oh, I wasn't aware that we have frontends that directly use ffserver and
> ffplay. I was only aware of front-ends for /usr/bin/ffmpeg, which is still
> provided.

Hey, I use/used ffprobe a lot (personally). Now, with mediainfo, I tend to
use it less, but we can't count on it being in as many places/installations
as is the case with ffmpeg.

> Do you have a list of packages that rely on
> /usr/bin/ff{play,server,probe}, so that we can file bugreports against
> them?

With the youtube-dl maintainer hat on, it will be annoying to have to
substitute ffprobe from the script, without an easy way of changing stuff.

Actually the necessities of youtube-dl are very basic (detecting if a given
audio track is in the file that was just downloaded from the video services
that youtube-dl supports).

If there is any documentation meant for upstreams here (well, last time I
checked, I was the 3rd most active committer of the project), I will gladly
update things, but one of the main youtube-dl purposes of youtube-dl is to
be as universal (OK, with some limitations) with respect to the
architectures and operating systems that it supports.

We use ffprobe to detect the audio and ffmpeg to strip the video part (for
those that want that). That is used by *many* projects, like all the
packagings in Linux, BSDs, and MacOS X "addons", like fink (a debian-like
system that I think that could be better if it didn't compile everything
from sources, macports, and Homebrew).

There may be people using even weirder systems that have reported success
with youtube-dl and the team prouds itself of supporting as many systems as
feasible.

With that said, are there any *recommended* way of using ffmpeg?

     ffprobe -show_streams

is very convenient to parse (it's mostly key-value pairs), while something
like

     ffmpeg -i input_file.mp4 -vn -an -sn

is harder.


Regards,

-- 
Rogério Brito : rbrito@{ime.usp.br,gmail.com} : GPG key 4096R/BCFCAAAA
http://rb.doesntexist.org : Packages for LaTeX : algorithms.berlios.de
DebianQA: http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=rbrito%40ime.usp.br