[Wine] RFC: New dependency on FFmpeg?

Andrew Udvare
Thu, 20 Aug 2015 22:19:16 -0000

On 20/08/15 12:47, Andrew Eikum wrote:
> An additional complication is the libav fork. The APIs that we're
> using are currently unchanged between FFmpeg and libav, so libav
> should function as a drop-in replacement. Further, distros seem to be
> migrating back to FFmpeg, if they ever changed. So again, I don't
> expect this to be a barrier.
>
> Wine packagers and developers, do you have any thoughts or objections
> to depending on FFmpeg/libav's libavutils and libavcodec for xaudio2
> support?

As unfortunate as this is, most applications that uses those libraries
are packaging their own copy of ffmpeg for a few reasons:

- ffmpeg APIs break (on point releases) too much
- Depending on the distro's copy of ffmpeg is very unreliable because of
said point releases
- libav (another project)/ffmpeg incompatibilities (I know you mentioned
this but numerous amount of people are probably still using libav by
default)

So basically I think you would have to propose inclusion of a version of
ffmpeg into Wine's source to get the green-light (and update as
necessary). Otherwise there will be a lot of new bug reports of crashes
landing in a probably stripped copy of the system's ffmpeg or libav,
with users not knowing how to give good information for debugging.

Just my 2 cents.

Andrew