[FFmpeg-devel] Project orientation

[Kieran Kunhya]

>
> > Would you want something experimental like x262 to be part of the
> > FFmpeg codebase, for us to have to maintain forever? If you don't limit
> > scope then that is what would happen.
>
> x262 is another example of a fork, where the fork alone was not
> popular/interesting enough to live on. If it were merged to x264, I am
> fairly certain it would not be experimental anymore, and we'd have an
> MPEG2 encoder which would scale much better to multiple cores than what we
> have now in ffmpeg.
>

Highly unlikely, x264 development has essentially ground to a halt. And
people use H.264 a lot still.
x262 works well enough for an old format like MPEG-2. There's no real need
to develop it unless someone needs to eke out an extra 2% compression
because they have a million MPEG-2 receivers they can't change.

The original x264 developers didn't want a merge back by the way.

And I'd also like to point to the linux kernel as an example of a
> monolitic code repository which seems to work quite well.
>

Exception that proves the rule. A lot of developers there are paid full
time to work on the kernel and just do cleanup, merge old patches etc.

Kieran