[OE-core] RFC: libav, ffmpeg, and OE-Core

[Paul Eggleton]

Hi all,

Video decoding is an important function for a lot of devices. We currently
have gst-ffmpeg, which includes the ffmpeg sources, in OE-Core but we don't have
ffmpeg or libav itself that is a bit more re-usable outside of GStreamer. This
brings up a few questions:

1) Which is the preferred option for OE; ffmpeg or its "fork" libav? libav
seems to be better suited to use as a library but on the other hand ffmpeg
isn't exactly dead. Some background:

http://aballier.wordpress.com/2013/01/18/ffmpeg-vs-libav-a-distribution-maintainer-point-of-view-almost-two-years-after-the-split/

http://blog.pkh.me/p/13-the-ffmpeg-libav-situation.html

2) Following on from that, should we pull the preferred library into OE-Core
and avoid the need for the current bbappend in meta-oe for gst-ffmpeg? (One of
my personal motivations for sorting this out). This would of course be
protected by LICENSE_FLAGS as we currently do with gst-ffmpeg.

Thoughts?

Cheers,
Paul



-- 

Paul Eggleton
Intel Open Source Technology Centre