Beside the ABI breakage that is needed to reduce the structures’ size, that as I blogged yesterday helps quite a bit, another of my currently worked on branches is the FFmpeg integration.
Now, xine-lib has used FFmpeg since ever, and it has an internal copy of it (although on Gentoo you use the external copy of it to reduce the size of the code, and avoid having double security problems), but that copy requires rewriting the build system from FFmpeg’s own makefiles to Makefile.am files, which is far from trivial and quite error prone.
It also requires to clone in configure.ac the tests for the features that are tested in FFmpeg’s own configure script, which is a waste of time when using external FFmpeg most of the time, and needs to be maintained over the long run as they might be modified by FFmpeg developers, and we can’t just copy them 1:1 as they don’t use autoconf either.
To solve this issue, I’ve been working before to implement a sort of Chinese Wall, so that FFmpeg’s build system could be called from xine’s automake build system without need to accommodate the Makefiles every time an upgrade is needed.
It wasn’t that difficult to begin with, but there was an obstacle with the make dist command that is used to create the distribution tarball, as there was no way to seemingly merge its processing with FFmpeg’s build system; today I then implemented a dist-hook that takes the list of files to add for FFmpeg support to the tarball. It requires an extra step during the update of the internal copy, but that’s far from being a problem, as it’s certainly more straightforward than it was to update the previous FFmpeg copy.
With this problem fixed, I was finally able to start working on getting distcheck working and thus trying to get a working branch out of it. The result is quite good, as I was able to get a distcheck running already, and I’m now working on actually implementing Miguel’s idea to disable the “uncommon” audio/video decoders present in FFmpeg; his work on the current 1.1 series is basically half-implemented, and probably never to be fixed, as it would require to change all the Makefile.am so that they take into consideration the huge amount of conditionals currently present in FFmpeg; I think once it’s completed I’ll just ask Miguel to give up on having it working in 1.1 series, as it’s unlikely to ever work decently… well, it might even work, but refreshing FFmpeg would require a huge amount of work, and we are understaffed already.
And by working on this branch, and on this idea, I already discovered two bugs in FFmpeg that I’ve locally patched.. the patches are now waiting (as usual) in ffmpeg-devel to be applied.
Hopefully, this will also be integrated in 1.2 series, that should then start being interesting…
