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Comment by nathancahill | Hacker News Reader

Interesting that they are pushing fixes for both FFmpeg and the libav fork. I guess they decided not to pick sides in that war.

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That is good. But this reminds me of the first time I installed 'ffmpeg' on Ubuntu only to have it not work with my well-tested parameters and also declare ffmpeg 'deprecated'. Only after some head scratching did I figure out it had installed libav and an ffmpeg wrapper that tried but failed to be compatible with the real ffmpeg interface.

I wasn't even aware of the split at the time, but this shenanigan definitely gave me a strong negative initial impression of libav.

libav tries to ship a compatible wrapper called ffmpeg and a redone one called avconv. But ffmpeg itself just ships ffmpeg and puts incompatible changes in there, so you'd actually be worse off.

What issues were you having, and with what file types?

Incompatible? Do you mean with libav?

Backwards incompatible with previous versions of itself.

Most of the old options have been mapped to the new interface (see opt_old2new() for instance). So most of the old commands are still compatible. Libav also has dropped ffmpeg forked copy since a long while, so FFmpeg is actually more retro compatible.

For sure. The story of FFmpeg and libav is full of sneaky shenanigans like that.

A good entry on this, for those interested: http://blog.pkh.me/p/13-the-ffmpeg-libav-situation.html

That is written by the FFmpeg side. Do you have a complementary view?

The mpv developers have published an overview of the situation from their independent perspective which (FWIW) is very accurate from my vantage point as well: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/wiki/FFmpeg-versus-Libav

I thought that shenanigan was entirely the result of actions by a DD/UD and not upstream?

I really miss ffprobe, I can never get avprobe to work on the first or second attempt.

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