[FFmpeg-devel] SWS cleanup / SPI Funding Suggestion

[Kieran Kunhya]

On Sat, 14 Oct 2023 at 00:17, Cosmin Stejerean via ffmpeg-devel <
ffmpeg-devel at ffmpeg.org> wrote:

>
>
> > On Oct 13, 2023, at 4:00 PM, Vittorio Giovara <
> vittorio.giovara at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > TBF this is in part why i was suggesting a new library - I feel like sws
> is
> > affected by bad brading because of these caching issues and imprecise
> > conversion, and a new clean api in a new library would make a lot of
> sense
> > in my opinion.
>
> I think the branding issue would solve itself in short order if the actual
> implementation of swscale started to be good. My concern with adding a new
> library is that we'd end up in a situation where we have both swscale and a
> new library side by side for some extended period of time.
>
> By comparison adding cleaner APIs to swscale and then slowly strangling
> the old APIs (along the lines of Niklas' proposal) would allow for a more
> gradual transition that has a higher likelihood of success compared to a
> full rewrite IMO.
>

The issue is not the API, the issue is that swscale is astonishingly
complex and difficult to understand internally, there are lots of different
codepaths and randomly you'll end up with a buggy or slow one and have no
idea how to fix it.

It's probably easier to start from scratch than to try and understand and
then fix swscale (years of work).

Regards,
Kieran Kunhya