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What is Your Operating System of Choice?
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(Score: 3, Informative) by Unixnut on Friday April 25, @01:56AM (4 children)
I stopped using Linux a while ago, but perhaps this site will help: https://www.deb-multimedia.org/ [deb-multimedia.org]
Not sure if you have seen it already, but these are packages that are built with all options enabled (including the ones not considered "open source" by Debian standards), I used it a lot in the past for my Debian AV editing and decoding machines, so that I would not have to bother re-compiling the packages myself to enable the features.
A quick local search for live555 [google.com] yielded some results, so perhaps it is of use to you?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 25, @11:52AM (3 children)
Thanks, this looks like the sort of solution I have been looking for - and not seen a single reference to until you showed it to me.
Also in the communication is a good thing department: I stumbled upon the Debian bug report that got live555 pulled in the first place, yesterday afternoon I e-mailed the live555 author asking if any steps had been taken to address the concerns raised in the bug report in early 2021: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=981439 [debian.org] and offering to do any re-write necessary to address the concerns.
He replied about an hour later:
Me: That's great! Did this just happen today? Are the gatekeepers at Debian aware of the change yet?
Yeah, communication.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Monday April 28, @10:12AM (2 children)
I am glad to have helped, but I admit I am surprised you did not come across it earlier. It was the de-facto way to avoid a lot of the self-imposed roadblocks on Debian purity of licensing, and once upon a time a quick search for anything A/V related "on Debian" would give you that page as the first result. It got really popular when Debian forked ffmpeg and renamed it "avconv", and slowly incompatibilities between them manifested, as the repo provided new ffmpeg packages.
While I don't begrudge Debian for its stance, it did get in the way of audio-visual work quite a lot (because of software patents, a lot of open source codecs and AV software was legally suspect in the USA, which was where Debian is based so they had to tread carefully). Hence the "deb-multimedia" repo was created with all the non-free and "not sure" stuff already compiled in, so we could use Debian for AV work without having to compile all the packages ourselves.
Yes, it is a shame, it does seem like communication has been going downhill in the Linux community, along with the community itself. Unfortunately with the influx of corporate money Linux became less open and more fragmented, as sometimes it is not in the interest of the corporate masters for things to be easy to understand and well documented.
Plus as more Linux development gets paid, I think you just see less collaboration between Linux devs, especially those who don't get paid and those that do.
Although in this particular case it just seems like a lack of motivation on the part of the author to update third-party bug reports. This is quite common for volunteer devs as they don't necessarily have the time or want to create multiple logins for each distro in order to update distro bug reports. That should in theory be the job of the package maintainer for that specific distro.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 28, @12:58PM
Well, the maintainer is actually chatting with me and we have reached the conclusion that my Ubuntu environment can't really leverage his work - this is more of a reinstall the system with Debian to make it go kind of thing... Coming at it from the Ubuntu perspective is probably why I didn't find it.
> This is quite common for volunteer devs as they don't necessarily have the time or want to create multiple logins for each distro in order to update distro bug reports. That should in theory be the job of the package maintainer for that specific distro.
Yeah, I totally get the developers' stance and agree that there should be package maintainers - not him - solving these things.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 29, @02:02AM
The kerfuffle between ffmpeg and libav was NOT over licensing. Instead, a large number of developers made an announcement that they were staging a coup and taking over the project. That came as a surprise to Fabrice Bellard and Michael Niedermayer, the absolute geniuses that represented something like 80% of the code base at the time. They tried to take over the domains, repos, trademarks, etc., but Ballard legally owned all of those. So, they were legally forced to make their own.
Despite losing the repos and the Gods-among-men responsible for most of the code, they decided to push forward. They created their own fork, and copied the logo and name of the library as libav. They used their positions at a number of distros to force them to change from ffmpeg to libav. The problem is that ffmpeg and its creators were better in every way that matters to basically everyone. They stayed ahead of security bugs, kept up with the latest codecs, had better performance and optimization support, responded to packagers, and even maintained compatibility with libav, etc. Libav, on the otherhand, stagnated, introduced their own bugs, had some fairly large issues, and continually feel behind and less responsive. Frankly, Ballard and Niedermayer were just better software engineers than the attempted usurpers. This left no choice but for them to change back to ffmpeg. Libav was left by its creators to wither on the vine while they moved on to other things.