[FFmpeg-devel] Supporting DirecTV captioning.

[Hendrik Leppkes]

On Thu, Sep 21, 2017 at 11:54 PM, Joseph Van Riper
<vanriper.trey at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I would normally not want to request of an open source team a fast response
> to something like this, but I sense some urgency to resolving this issue
> for the folks who have asked me to look into it.  I will feel compelled to
> move forward with something by sometime next week... I just would prefer it
> fit in with your recommendations to avoid wasting effort.
>

You should know that some of the ffmpeg developers are at a conference
this weekend, so reponses will possibly be reduced for the next few
days.

Generally (and definitely IMHO), writing non-standard files based on a
proprietary specification for one specific piece of (apparently bad)
hardware is not something we really enjoy around here. It often
results in unmaintained and hard-to-test code, since correctness can
only be verified with one specific piece of hardware, which may not
even exist in the future anymore - even more so if its entangled in
multiple components throughout the codebase.

Keeping that in mind, the changes should be as self-contained and
minimal as possible, anything that requires more logic in every caller
that wants to create CC data seems like a bad idea already, and
increases the maintenance burden. If there is only minimal differences
in a header, perhaps the function should just have a flags parameter
to change how it writes headers, or something like that, so that as
much code as possible can be shared between alternate variants (within
reason).

- Hendrik