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Comment by camperman | Hacker News Reader

You're right but I was unaware of the fork. I installed Ubuntu 14.04 on my workstation, ran ffmpeg to do something and got a message which said:

"This program is not developed anymore and is only provided for compatibility. Use avconv instead."

Five minutes googling and I realized there had been a (somewhat acrimonious) fork. So my interpretation was quite natural: the libav developers and/or the Ubuntu maintainers were being dicks to the original project. If they really wanted to be clear they could have said something like:

"This is a deprecated wrapper around avconv, part of libav. It is not part of the ffmpeg project. See <url> for details."

How hard would that have been?

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14.04 broke a previously working build because of this. I spent way more time than needed trying to debug it because of this cryptic bullshit.

It's something in between.

"The ffmpeg program is only provided for script compatibility and will be removed in a future release. It has been deprecated in the Libav project to allow for incompatible command line syntax improvements in its replacement called avconv (see Changelog for details). Please use avconv instead."

I won't take a position on this but the message you quote is a revised version that was put in place many years later after numerous user complaints about confusion.

And in my opinion it's still very confusing. If there was a more confusing version of this message and it was refined to this then I'm inclined to believe the deception was intentional.

libav is not the successor to ffmpeg. libav is a fork. How'd Debian move so quickly to a(n) (immature) fork?

Politics.

No, it moved because the forkers were also the Debian package maintainers.

Basically it was a big split down the middle, the entire project split in half.

Which makes Debian's return to FFmpeg all the more noteworthy.

So it was political, like I said.

Not to kick 'em while they're down but it certainly wasn't on technical merit.

That's not really true since the majority of pre-fork ffmpeg developers agreed to fork to libav.

As I say to people this is like the Catholic/Protestant split, both sides think they are the one-true-ffmpeg but both have valid claims. Doesn't change the fact it's a disastrous situation and both projects are not in particularly good states.

>both sides think they are the one-true-ffmpeg but both have valid claims.

ffmpeg is the one-true-ffmpeg. If libav surpassed ffmpeg, we'd have libav. The one-true-libav. libav doesn't have a valid claim; It's a fork second to ffmpeg.

Somebody put the cart before the horse. Happy to see it fixed.

This. Ubuntu was the main reason why people assumed ffmpeg became deprecated, in other words libav just got more vocal PR/support.

Gentoo initially followed the mainstream but changed the default flag to ffmpeg a few months ago.

>How hard would that have been?

Probably pretty rough on the ego.

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