Select provider of libav* libraries

[Fabian Greffrath]

Hi all,

Am Montag, den 04.05.2015, 11:40 +0200 schrieb Bálint Réczey: 
> Please cast your vote before Friday noon (8th May) with a brief
> explanation if you would like to participate in the decision.

*sigh*

I am replying as someone who is listed among the Uploaders of the libav
package, but whose name was already there when the package was still
called "ffmpeg". I was in no way involved in the fork (or in upstream
development at all) and found the reasons for the fork and the way it
was performed back then, well, irritating, to say the least. My
involvement in the Debian packaging has vastly decreased since then.

I have no strong opinion towards one or the other, libav or ffmpeg, but
am generally preferring to "never change a running system" and keep
things as they are. However, there are currently two issues that changed
this way of thinking:

1) Currently, I cannot use OpenCV+LibAV for my scientific research.
At work, we have a high-speed camera which records video frames in a
proprietary video format called CINE (whose specifications are
publically available, though). Libavformat of LibAV is not able to read
this format, whereas the library provided by FFmpeg is. I use OpenCV as
packaged in Debian to do some image evaluation on the video frames, but
since it is linked against libavformat, it cannot read the videos
natively but have to convert them into an intermediate format first,
which is cumbersome. I have filed a merge request on the LibAV bug
tracker more than half a year ago, with zero response so far:

https://bugzilla.libav.org/show_bug.cgi?id=764

2) Currently, video players fail to play some of my archived videos.
I have some spurious DVD rips at home which are encoded with the DivX 5
codec. These videos play back heavily distorted with any video player
(with the exception of VLC, I have no idea why) that is linked against
the LibAV libraries. They play back without any artifacts with players
linked against the FFmpeg libraries. I have filed a bug report on the
LibAV bug tracker, including a screenshot and a video sample more than
four months ago, again with zero response so far:

https://bugzilla.libav.org/show_bug.cgi?id=794

These two incidents lead me to believe that Debian is better off with
FFmpeg instead of LibAV. Don't get me wrong, I know that every software
may contain bugs and it is not the mere presence of these two bugs that
made me draw that conclusion. But the sheer ignorance of user requests
and bug reports at LibAV upstream made me finally lose my faith in this
project. I feel sorry I have to write this, but you have asked...

Cheers,

Fabian

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