[Bf-committers] Updating FFMPEG

[Nathan Letwory]

Hi,

Developer nexYon has been working on the soundsystem branch for getting 
sound working again in Blender, and so it does. In BGE there is now nice 
3D-sound and so on.

To get this working nicely, it would be nice if we could update FFMPEG 
in Blender. I propose to use the autobuild libraries [1] (with small 
non-intrusive patches to two header files of those autobuilds) instead 
of the source code in extern/ffmpeg. Tests have shown that these 
libraries work nicely with both MSVC and MingW compilers. This would 
mean that we could easily update to newer versions of FFMPEG, whenever 
the need arises. As an nice additional benefit is that we can keep up 
with newer versions/builds of FFMPEG easily, meaning that Linux 
distributions can also more easily use system-wide libraries. As you may 
be aware, there have been discussions on debian package maintainer list 
to drop Blender from the repositories, because we generally lag behind 
with FFMPEG a lot. As a nice side-effect, we could get rid of extern/ffmpeg.

This proposal is also to ready lib/windows in anticipation of merging 
soundsystem branch into blender2.5 branch. From what I understand this 
will give all necessary means for us having proper sound support in 
Blender. I have not extensively tested the used build, if anyone feels 
like it, I used the build from 2009-08-07, revision r29479 (by 
comparison, according the readme in lib/windows/ffmpeg we use r12758). 
Apply http://www.pasteall.org/7028 to the downloaded ffmpeg libs. Get 
the shared-dev for the .lib-files, and the shared package for the dlls. 
Rename the .lib files to have the -versionnumber included as you can 
already see in lib/windows/ffmpeg/lib. Copy everything in place and rebuild.

In short:
1) use autobuilds from [1] and get rid of extern/ffmpeg
2) prepare for soundsystem branch merger
3) safe nerves of poor coders by not having to build ffmpeg manually
4) potentially not disappear from ie. debian package repository.

/Nathan


[1] http://ffmpeg.arrozcru.org/autobuilds/
-- 

Nathan Letwory

http://www.planetblender.org | http://www.blender-fi.org