On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 11:47:03AM -0700, Andrei Thorp wrote:
Well, that's a decent point also -- if gstreamer can use ffmpeg as a backend, does it not superscede ffmpeg? It's reasonable to assume that this means that gstreamer "supports all of ffmpeg plus a little bit of extra".
Well, actually I see some unuseful complexity in this approach (you need both gstreamer and ffmpeg for playing videos), and I think it slows down the adoption of the latest software releases, as a new ffmpeg has to be included in gstreamer, and so on. But there's another point: I *think*, but I'm absolutely not sure, that the ffmpeg gstreamer plugin does not support all the codecs that ffmpeg supports natively, because of licensing problem. AFAIK, ffmpeg aims to support a large set of codecs, even if there're patent issues, while gstreamer is more careful about these issues, and probably has stripped down ffmpeg. p.