About time. I'm usually all for forking and variety, but libav truly was an example of those gratuitous and destructive forks that offered no real benefit. Though, ultimately, it was the Debian package maintainers' decision to spread propaganda about ffmpeg being deprecated that was the worst.

As a practical example, I was gridlocked when I tried to compile LightSpark from Git, due to libswresample not being present, nor practically obtainable. Editing it out from cmake, predictably, lead to breakage.

Here's a classic article detailing the situation: http://blog.pkh.me/p/13-the-ffmpeg-libav-situation.html

And from the mpv developers: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/wiki/FFmpeg-versus-Libav