Hi Diego, On Tue, Oct 31, 2006 at 07:46:01PM +0100, Diego Biurrun wrote: > Removing the embedded copies of FFmpeg libraries from MPlayer is a bad > idea.
For the workload on the security team and the overall quality of Debian (a single source package for whatever produced binary packages), I strongly disagree. > The relationship between MPlayer and FFmpeg is very intimate to say the > least. MPlayer uses FFmpeg HEAD via a svn:external declaration. In the > future we will move both to a common repository. Most FFmpeg developers > work on MPlayer as well. Other software also use ffmpeg. AFAIK, ffmpeg do *not* need mplayer to work. > FFmpeg is highly volatile and fast-moving. The FFmpeg snapshot in > Debian is two months older than the one in MPlayer 1.0rc1. This may not > sound much, but it means more than 600 (!) commits to the FFmpeg > repository. > > Using the Debian version of FFmpeg in MPlayer would create a beast > entirely different from 1.0rc1. Several codecs have been added which > were only available through binaries before, many bugs have been fixed > and speed improvements committed. The Debian version can also be updated. I fail to see the issue here. Samuel Hocevar, the Debian ffmpeg maintainer, is really open-minded and cooperative. > A H.264 video decoding benchmark done by a fellow developer gives the > following numbers: > > self-built custom binary: 13.9 seconds > Debian MPlayer package: 14.7 seconds > binary with Debian's FFmpeg: 17.7 seconds > > The Debian FFmpeg binary was built against dynamic FFmpeg, the other two > with static FFmpeg. That's a massive 20% performance degradation.. > > Using a shared dynamic version of FFmpeg would disable several video > filters, so there would be even more feature loss. First, on what architecture did you test that? I expect the gap to be reduced on non-x86 architectures. x86 is a register-starved architecture and one of those four general purpose registers is used by PIC code, so dynamic linking can really drop the performance as your benchmark shows. Then, I can agree with you that static linking has better performance. Therefore, what I can recommand is to build mplayer statically, but with a Debian up-to-date ffmpeg package. I am CCing Samuel Hocevar to get his opinion on the matter... > Plus I expect random bugs to creep up. As mentioned above FFmpeg is > highly volatile and fast-moving. Backwards-compatibility is not a > priority. That will *not* happen with an up-to-date ffmpeg package which other packages might benefit from. Cheers, -- .''`. Aurélien GÉRÔME : :' : `. `'` Free Software Developer `- Unix Sys & Net Admin
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