eselect news read 2015-02-01-use-libav Title ffmpeg/libav conflict management: USE=libav Author Michał Górny Posted 2015-02-01 Revision 2 The support for automatic choice between ffmpeg and libav is going to be deprecated in favor of explicit choice via USE flags. This change aims to solve multiple repeating issues, including Portage undesirably wanting to replace one package with the other, lack of proper reverse dependency on ffmpeg/libav upgrades and some of the hard-to-understand upgrade failures involving blockers. It also may be used to make ffmpeg and libav co-installable in the future. The current USE=ffmpeg will maintain its role of enabling optional support for ffmpeg or a compatible implementation (libav) in a package. However, whenever appropriate additional USE=libav will be introduced to control the preference of one implementation over the other. Users who currently use libav need to enable USE=libav in /etc/portage/make.conf. It should be noted that users still need to enable USE=ffmpeg on packages with optional libav support as well. Users who currently use ffmpeg need to take no action. Please also note that some packages support only one of the two implementations. An attempt to install one of those packages may result in blockers requiring the user changes the global USE=libav state. Please do not alter the state of 'libav' flag on a per-package basis (e.g. via package.use). The flag needs to be set globally to have consistent value throughout all packages. Otherwise, blockers will prevent upgrades. 2015-04-16-ffmpeg-default Title FFmpeg default Author Ben de Groot Posted 2015-04-16 Revision 1 Since the choice between ffmpeg and libav has been made more explicit, there has been a lot of discussion about what the default implementation should be. It can be concluded that media-video/ffmpeg has wider support, and would be somewhat more convenient for most end-users. For this reason the default implementation has been switched back from media-video/libav to media-video/ffmpeg by removing the libav useflag from the base profile. If the libav useflag is already globally enabled or disabled in /etc/portage/make.conf, then no further action is required. Users who implicitly relied on libav being enabled in their profile, and who wish to continue using libav, should enable USE=libav in their /etc/portage/make.conf file.