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Comment by dangerlibrary | Hacker News Reader

ffmpeg is downright magical - just don't get caught using the one in the Ubuntu/Debian repositories. Compile your own ffmpeg if you have any need to do serious work; the Libav fork just isn't as capable. The reasons are obvious if you look into the development philosophies of the two projects.

https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/wiki/FFmpeg-versus-Libav

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I think that ffmpeg is returning in Ubuntu 15 http://www.webupd8.org/2014/11/ffmpeg-returns-to-official-ub...

Actually in Debian as well.

> ffmpeg is downright magical

Actually, in my experience, ffmpeg is the linux-program that by far outshines any other program in... failing or crashing :/

I'm sorry to say this. And, unfortunately, there isn't any other open source program doing a better job in terms of file format support.

I would agree that ffmpeg has warts. It is pretty poorly documented. Also, filter pipelines are finicky and not commutative, which can be super confusing, but most of the time you don't need them. Aspect ratio syntax is a disaster, but aspect ratio specifications are a little bit of a disaster, so I don't know how much to blame ffmpeg. But simply failing or crashing? I can't say I've ever had a crash that wasn't the result of a misconfiguration on my part.

What's nice is that on linux VLC is basically a QT4 GUI wrapper around ffmpeg, so you can do pretty much whatever you need to do from within VLC.

I think ffmpeg deserves my support on this as well. I maintain a video system at work and using ffmpeg for conversions. ffmpeg has never given me troubles (we compile our own ffmpeg).

The video play "mpv" is also almost a wrapper around ffmpeg, it seems.

Let me guess: you are using Ubuntu?

Use the version at http://deb-multimedia.org

    echo "deb http://www.deb-multimedia.org stable main non-free" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/deb-multimedia.org.list
    apt-get -q update; apt-get -qy dist-upgrade
    apt-get -qqy install ffmpeg

I always build my own as, afaik, it's the only way to get full support for the more interesting codecs e.g. fdkaac & h265.

You can ask him to add them, he's pretty responsive to requests.

Debian unstable has official ffmpeg packages, and as soon as the next release completes, those packages will migrate to testing and future stable.

Seems unlikely that the security team would be happy having both ffmpeg and libav in Debian, so a GR would be needed to override them.

There are a number of useful codecs and filters that have non-free licenses. Debian packages will never have them enabled. Self compiles are the only way to get the ffmpeg kitchen sink.

Almost all of the questionably licensed and non-free codecs were removed from ffmpeg years ago. The only remaining bits left are those for AAC support via libfaac, and ffmpeg has its own reimplemented version of AAC that doesn't depend on libfaac.

You might be thinking of mplayer, which has extensive support for non-free codecs, such as the "w32codecs" bundle.

I used the http://www.deb-multimedia.org/ repository in a pinch for ffmpeg recently. Third party repo aside, what criticisms are there for this ffmpeg compared to a compiled copy?

Don't compile it just use the official binaries!

That's a good option if the official binaries support all the codecs you need and have all the correct hardware acceleration flags set for your particular CPU/GPU. That's ... theoretically possible, I suppose.

ffmpeg binaries come with all possible codecs and all possible CPU features. The first is actually bad, because it will do far more things than you've actually tested and can secure. (In fact, nobody on earth has tested most possible ffmpeg command lines.)

The second is the way almost all sensible x86 software should behave.

Programs like ffmpeg compile in code paths for all hardware acceleration flags (mmx, sse, avx), then use runtime detection to use the right code for your cpu.

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