[FFmpeg-devel] [RFC] Support dynamic loading of third-party libs

[Stephen Hutchinson]

On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 12:37 PM, Marc Giger <gigerstyle at gmx.ch> wrote:
> That's a very good point. Never thought about it in this detail.
> Given that fact I have to admin that dynamic loading makes
> less sense. There may still be some usecases e.g. vaapi where it
> would make sense, but this seems to be the minority.
>

I think the most obvious benefit at this point is something that
was alluded to at the beginning of the discussion: avoidance of
hard dependencies.  There have been times I've run into issues
because a shared library FFmpeg was linked against somehow
got removed or was updated and broke compatibility.

Dynamic loading allows the main binary to still function
correctly if this occurs, with the issue only arising if the user
attempts to use the missing library, in which case the
methodology of doing dynamic loading allows for a graceful
exit rather than the program crashing.