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Multimedia Powerhouse FFmpeg Hits 3.0
An anonymous reader writes: The milestone release FFmpeg 3.0 "Einstein" has been unleashed. For those who need a reminder, FFmpeg comprises several libraries and command-line tools (the main command-line tool being "ffmpeg") that encode, decode, transcode, and stream audio/visual data, etc. FFmpeg supports a multitude of codecs, filters, and container formats too numerous to mention here. FFmpeg is used by MPlayer, VLC, HandBrake, Chrome, and many other projects. Changes from 2.x to 3.0 include: a much better native AAC encoder, better hardware acceleration, and some API/ABI breakage. See this, this, this, this, and the changelog for much better descriptions of the improvements.
Debian was a big player in the libAV mess, and they recently switched back to ffmpeg, so I imagine mint will at some point too.
If you want the newest ffmpeg and on any Linux, you can easily do what I did last night. The ffmpeg page has copy/paste instructions for downloading and compiling the newest ffmpeg with the newest versions of the libraries/ codecs it uses. Those instructions set PREFIX to something other than /usr or /usr/local so it doesn't step on anything installed on the system. It was really simple. I was using a very old version of Fedora, but didn't have any problems of missing dependencies because the dependencies are included in the instructions.
One of the libraries takes a long time to compile, so I let that run while I and did other things. If you copy/paste exactly, you end up with the new ffmpeg in $HOME/bin/ . You can of course change that, or move it after it has compiled.
You could try it out
https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/H...
Unfortunately, the current release of vlc refuses to build against ffmpeg-3.0. Transcode and xine-libs are also broken by the changes, but those might be fixable. One day, many of us will be using ffmpeg-3.0 in our systems : but it might be a few weeks away.
I remember that crap. It was fucked the way they changed it so it seemed like it was ffmpeg was installed but it wasn't. It broke so many applications and I couldn't figure out why. It used to work and then it didn't. When I figured it out I was more than annoyed. Sure if you want to change to libav go ahead but don't call it ffmpeg. I then got to compile ffmpeg from scratch. They didn't have any nifty cut and paste instructions at the time.
The narrative keeps changing. The first pass I heard was ffmpeg was full of NIH, haphazard bullshit, retard babies, and idiot politics, with code quality going down the shitter, hence the fork to libav; the latest pass I heard was ffmpeg folds in all the important features and bugfixes libav makes, while libav goes all NIH and re-implements their own from scratch, often simply ignoring bugs because it's run by a development team of retard babies and driven entirely by idiot politics.
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Compiling FFmpeg on Ubuntu / Debian / Mint
Compiling FFmpeg on CentOS / RHEL / Fedora
Other platforms.