"would probably be astonished by the number of developers who are building ffmpeg from source"
Its a do-ocracy and if it took two or so years until Andreas packaged it up, I'm not thinking the claimed demand actually exists. All those devs going to all that work to compile ffmpeg, and yet none of them could be bothered to run dpkg-buildpackage... nah just not seeing it.
There's a relevant line from the post "No, there is no need to replace anything as long as it is maintained." This is why ffmpeg was gone for quite awhile, no one willing to maintain it.
(edited to add, if its not entirely clear, this was totally a bottom up decision not top down, at least as I see it. Not "Debian decided this and that" but individual devs didn't want to package ffmpeg, so it didn't get packaged. That simple. Of course there's social aspects so simple things are never entirely simple... If you want an example of something in Debian being forced top down via general resolution votes and the like, look no further than the systemd debacle)
The debian package maintainer of ffmpeg was/is one of the libav guys and decided to replace ffmpeg with libav.
Judging by several frustrated comments in this thread, it has obviously been a hurtful decision.
> none of them could be bothered to run dpkg-buildpackage
A quick google search shows that lots of people ran dpkg-buildpackage and even put their results up for download.
It sounds like you're surprised nobody tried to upload them... Well, maybe it's not surprising that nobody wanted to get embroiled in another Debian developer power struggle?
> "would probably be astonished by the number of developers who are building ffmpeg from source"
> Its a do-ocracy and if it took two or so years until > Andreas packaged it up, I'm not thinking the claimed demand actually exists. All those devs going to all that work to compile ffmpeg, and yet none of them could be bothered to run dpkg-buildpackage... nah just not seeing it.
I have only been using ffmpeg for 8 months for quick track mixing so I don't know much about its history but going on ffmpeg.org always led me to some ready to use and out-of-the-box binaries hosted there http://ffmpeg.gusari.org/static/ so I don't really see the need for a deb package. (unless the environment is minimal and many lib are missing ? I don't use minimal debian anymore so there's that). Am I missing something ?
Technically, no. But recall that there are many packages that build on libav* or libsw* that could/should also be on ffmpeg which is, as noted elsewhere in this discussion, a safer, more capable build.
Note that most ffmpeg builds are NOT redistributable due to licensing issues - using common libraries like the best AAC encoder available (FDK-AAC) will make your FFmpeg build unredistributable due to licensing issues.
I don't think you can jump to that conclusion. It's fairly easy to get ffmpeg installed without official Debian support, after all; there's no need to reach out on StackOverflow or mailing lists, where such demand could be measured.
Anecdotal data point: In my last two companies, we installed ffmpeg through custom-built packages. Libav just isn't an option.
Its a do-ocracy and if it took two or so years until Andreas packaged it up, I'm not thinking the claimed demand actually exists. All those devs going to all that work to compile ffmpeg, and yet none of them could be bothered to run dpkg-buildpackage... nah just not seeing it.
There's a relevant line from the post "No, there is no need to replace anything as long as it is maintained." This is why ffmpeg was gone for quite awhile, no one willing to maintain it.
(edited to add, if its not entirely clear, this was totally a bottom up decision not top down, at least as I see it. Not "Debian decided this and that" but individual devs didn't want to package ffmpeg, so it didn't get packaged. That simple. Of course there's social aspects so simple things are never entirely simple... If you want an example of something in Debian being forced top down via general resolution votes and the like, look no further than the systemd debacle)