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

[Andrew Sayers]

On Mon, Jun 17, 2024 at 09:29:57PM +0200, Vittorio Giovara wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 17, 2024 at 9:01 PM Nicolas George <george at nsup.org> wrote:
> 
> > Michael Niedermayer (12024-06-17):
> > > 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.
> > >
> > > https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=txproto,ffserver
> > >
> > > So even though ffserver is dead, removed and unmaintained, it has more
> > > users
> > >
> > > 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.
> > >
> > > We should put a newly developed ffserver into the main ffmpeg git.
> > > We should put wasm build support into the main ffmpeg git.
> > > We should turn ffplay into a fully competetive player.
> > > ...
> >
> > Hear! Hear!
> >
> > I would add, as general guiding principles:
> >
> > We should provide both low- and high-level APIs. Ideally, the fftools
> > should be just user interface around the high-level APIs provided by the
> > libraries.
> 
> 
> Patches welcome? Not that it means anything, but you had exactly 2 lines on
> ffserver before it got removed, so I wonder who exactly you think should be
> maintaining all that cruft code (honest question, if you have a real plan
> for solving this ageless problem I think many people on the ML would be
> interested)

This isn't a hard problem to solve, just a boring one:

If you want more contributions, you need more contributors.
If you want more contributors, you need to make it easy to get started.
If you want to make it easy to get started, focus on the tedious things
that trip newbies up, not the interesting problems you'd like them to have.

You talked elsewhere about moving to a modern UI.  That's a fine long-term goal,
but how about starting simple - instead of waiting for patches to go stale
and making people beg, apply patches 48 hours after the thread goes quiet,
then revert them if someone asks for more time to review.