> It isn't even that. ffmpeg and libav were two competing forks of the exact same project, not two distinct projects working to implement the same thing.

But given enough time they would become very distinct.

The actual history of the projects doesn't bear that theory out. Aside from the rename itself and a couple of minor API changes, the projects stayed pretty close together, and a lot of patches got copied between the pair.

ffmpeg is a fairly complex project which deals with a number of esoteric topics (file formats, audio/video compression formats, audio/video processing, etc). The number of open-source developers who are qualified to work on it, and who have the time and inclination to do so, is fairly limited; I suspect that there simply isn't a large enough population of those developers to support multiple actively developed projects in this space.

Patches were copied one way, and functionality was deprecated in ffmpeg but the only way to do it in libav (audio.) As someone who was writing software using the ffmpeg/libav apis it was a horrible confusing mess. Since distros were split you had to support both and the each had different quirks. It was a dark time that I'm glad is over.