[Bug 340303] Re: Please sync with upstream release of ffmpeg .5

[Sindhudweep Sarkar]

Reinhard,

I'm not sure i'm qualified since i'm neither the maintainer of ffmpeg
package nor am I an upstream developer of the project; Here are my
thoughts on it. Hopefully a good dialogue will help us formulate if it's
worth it to break the freeze.

>From my understanding some api/abi changes were made september of last
year to ffmpeg. I am guessing that the current versions of mplayer and
vlc have either adapted or are using their own versions of libavcodec
and libavformat. I expect on the whole for .5 to not be very different
than how svn was feb 4th. From what I can gather, ffmpeg itself was in a
psuedo freeze to prevent regressions, and theoretically new features
can't cause regressions. The only thing somewhat troublesome are fixes
to timestamp handling for x264. This could cause other bugs to appear.
Given the above, .5 primarily represents bugfixes and cleanup to what
was in the code base on february 4th, and from a release engineering
point of view it represents a common point for other distributions to
grab onto perhaps making maintainance cheaper.


Pros
------
Upstream release instead of svn means possibly more collaboration with other distributions and possibly more stable bugfixing in the future.

Less patches and cleanups should, in theory, need to be maintained from
the upstream version by tracking it more closely.

Bug Reporting upstream is easier with a tagged branch that upstream
expects bugs from than from an older svn build likely to make upstream
more unhappy.

Fixes to VDPAU support should make some nvidia blog users happy.

Cons
------
Bug fixes to h264 timestamp handling could cause regressions. 

FFMPeg developers probably don't want to backport features to .5; Few
"end user" features in .5 that were not in svn on feb. 4th. Other
distributions could just as easily choose to track svn.

If vaapi isn't backported to .5, netbook users with poulsbo and others
with via chrome 4xx/5xx will probably want karmic to track svn not
.5+backports.

Not sure what others think; I'd imagine ffmpeg is pretty popular so
hopefully someone has some strong opinions to the points above and other
benefits/concerns to upgrading.

-- 
Please sync with upstream release of ffmpeg .5
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/340303
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