[FFmpeg-devel] [RFC] 5 year plan & Inovation

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Le 17 juin 2024 20:34:39 GMT+02:00, Michael Niedermayer <michael at niedermayer.cc> a écrit :
>also if you look at google trends, even today more people search for ffserver
>than txproto. In fact at every point in time more people searched for ffserver
>than txproto.

Nobody looks at txproto since it's (AFAIK) a one-person experimental project that almost no one knows about. I don't think that metric has any relevance whatsoever, TBH.


>
>So even though ffserver is dead, removed and unmaintained, it has more
>users

It's easy to have more users than one. I'm sure even VLS that has been unmaintained for 20 years, give or take, has more users than txproto, by that questionable metric.

>
>And this comes back to what i said many times. We should use the name
>FFmpeg, our domain and NOT push every bit of new inovation out into
>sub projects.

It proves no such thing. And that goes against all common sense. Using FFmpeg branding and website is one thing; if the community agrees to it, why not. But tying different projects into a single git tree is just plain dumb.

Git is not designed to handle more than one release timeline for one thing, and you will need separate release timelines if you take up separate projects.

Also people have been complaining about excess traffic on ffmpeg-devel, which indicates that we should break stuff down into smaller projects (if it were practical - I don't think it is in this particular case), rather than let the scope creep.

>We should put a newly developed ffserver into the main ffmpeg git.

Well, if you have funding for developing and maintaining it, I don't think people will object much. Because it's not that big of a stretch from what FFmpeg is, and no stretch at all from what it was.

>We should put wasm build support into the main ffmpeg git.

Sure, if it can pass code reviews absolutely. WASM should be treated as just another ISA.

>We should turn ffplay into a fully competetive player.

No. First there is no such thing as "a fully competitive player". You would need at least one mobile player, one smart TV and STB player and one desktop player, on top of the existing crude CLI player. And that's if you manage Android and iOS, mac and Windows, together. Otherwise it's even more players.

Then you would need each of them to have features that FFmpeg doesn't have as a back-end, notably media library management.

That's a lot of work, mostly GUI work. No offence but you and most other devs here don't strike me as GUI devs. VLC is pretty much dead now for under-estimating how hard it was to rewrite the desktop UI. How will you find and keep motivated the developers for all that UI work? They are not going to manifest spontaneously, even less so in a community with a deservedly horrible reputation as FFmpeg's.

Unless you just won the Euromillion or something like that, this is not going to happen. No ifs or buts about it.