Re: [Ranger-users] Video files: thumbnail previews

[niku]

Hello

ffmpegthumbnailer gives no such warning. 

I investigated a bit about the confusion with ffmpeg and avconv. If
interested, please read on.

The Debian (and Ubuntu) warning which I quoted in my initial mail is
misleading, and probably intentionally so. FFmpeg is not dead, and is
not dying anytime soon!

In 2011, some developers from the FFmpeg project (supplier of the
binary `ffmpeg') forked the project to create libav (supplier of the
binary `avconv'.) The Debian and Ubuntu package maintainer for FFmpeg
is one of the people who forked the project, so he made the switch for
the distributions.

The warning refers to `ffmpeg' binary _provided by libav_, not the
`ffmpeg' binary provided by the project FFmpeg. The project libav
supplies an `ffmpeg' binary for compatibility, and the warning I
quoted merely says that the binary supplied for compatibility will
“soon go away”. As I said, FFmpeg project is quite alive. The last
major release was just 3 weeks back, and there have been some 200 bug
reports in the last two months (with half of them resolved by now).

You of course get to decide which to use. But I found that the people
who forked have been behaving childishly. In the beginning they didn’t
even rename their fork (which created a lot of confusion, especially
as the package maintainer of Debian and Ubuntu made the switch). (See
[1], [2] and [3].) Now their homepage makes no mention of either
`FFmpeg' or `ffmpeg' even though they copied just everything,
including the documentation. Then there is the misleading warning,
which wasted quite a lot of your and my time. And to cap it all, you
may wish to read a rant by one of the people who forked the
project.[4] By the end it invokes Godwin’s Law, claiming, in effect,
that since the project leader of FFmpeg and you-guessed-who are both
Austrians, they are similar in character!

[1] 
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9477115/who-can-tell-me-the-difference-and-relation-between-ffmpeg-libav-and-avconv/9477756#9477756
[2] 
http://superuser.com/questions/507386/libav-vs-ffmpeg-better-to-use-libav-avconv-today
[3] http://blog.pkh.me/p/13-the-ffmpeg-libav-situation.html
[4] http://codecs.multimedia.cx/?p=339

~niku

On Mon, Jul 29, 2013 at 07:48:00PM +0300, Germain Zouein wrote:
> Thanks. What about ffmpegthumbnailer (it's what's used in the current 
> branch)? Does that cause the same warnings?
> 
> niku <address@hidden> wrote:
> >> @ niku
> >> avconv is broken for my distro and I don't have the time to look
> >> into it right now. Could you please test if the same syntax works
> >> for it (replacing 'ffmpeg' with 'avconv')? I think I'll add another
> >> setting for that.
> >
> >The options of ffmpeg and avconv are supposed to be exactly the same,
> >except that for avconv you need to follow the correct order strictly.
> >However, if I substitute `avconv' for `ffmpeg' in your command, avconv
> >extracts the beginning frame, not the frame around the 10th second,
> >which ffmpeg extracts.
> >
> >ffmpeg -itsoffset -10 -i input.wmv -vframes 1 -y /tmp/ffmpeg-its.png
> >       --> gets the frame at around 10s
> >avconv -itsoffset -10 -i input.wmv -vframes 1 -y /tmp/avconv-its.png
> >       --> gets the first frame
> >
> >However, have you tried the option `-ss'? `-ss 10' substituted for
> >`-itsoffset -10', produces the desired result with both ffmpeg and
> >avconv.  Further, on my system, it works much faster. With -itsoffset,
> >ffmpeg takes 1.80s to extract the frame at 10s. With -ss, ffmpeg takes
> >just 0.08s to extract the same frame! Also, the manpages of both
> >ffmpeg and avconv seem to suggest the use of -ss for extracting
> >images:
> >
> >           If you want to extract just a limited number of
> >           frames, you can use the above command in combination
> >           with the -vframes or -t option, or in combination with
> >           -ss to start extracting from a certain point in time.
> >
> >
> >ffmpeg -ss 10 -i input.wmv -vframes 1 -y /tmp/ffmpeg-its.png
> >avconv -ss 10 -i input.wmv -vframes 1 -y /tmp/ffmpeg-its.png
> >       --> both the commands get the frame at around 10s.
> >
> >       Note the `10', instead of the `-10' with -itsoffset.