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A comment on The FFmpeg/Libav situation (2012). Parent comment

Re:The FFmpeg/Libav situation (2012) by duskwuff on Saturday April 15, 2023 @10:16PM (#35586649)
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.

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Re:The FFmpeg/Libav situation (2012) by TheCycoONE on Saturday April 15, 2023 @11:13PM (#35586939)
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.
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