Gentoo Video project

1.  Project Description

The Video team strives to provide users with the best multimedia experience through providing encoding tools and media players. We do so by maintaining various video based applications including MPlayer, Xine, and Transcode.

2.  Developers

All developers can be reached by e-mail using nickname@gentoo.org.

3.  Subprojects

The video project has the following subprojects:

4.  Resources

Resources offered by the video project are:

• Notes about media-libs/xine-lib package and relative frontends
• Notes about media-video/vlc package

5.  Herds

The video project maintains the following herds:

6.  Notes about removed packages

In autumn 2005 many packages which were present on portage for a long time were removed, for a series of different causes. Most of them are not going to re-enter portage until upstream decides to clean up their own dirt, as they were a high weight to maintain.

Packages that were depending on divx4linux should all be able to read and write DivX files using ffmpeg's MPEG4 codec, and that package was so bugged that it was segfaulting on newer Pentium4 processors. It was also closed source and it was then impossible to maintain.

helixplayer was removed because it had a bad history of serious security-related problems, and it was difficult to maintain because of its complex build system. Looking forward for the new 2.0 version, the old 1.x ebuilds got removed from the tree, people using it can consider using realplayer instead, or a more complete video player such as xine or mplayer.

quicktime4linux was another hard-maintenance package because of its custom build scripts that were not working well for Gentoo's standards. It also used nasm heavily, making it impossible to use it on non-x86 based systems (amd64 systems seemed to work, too). Instead of this, it's possible to use libquicktime that forked from the old 1.x series of the package and still works fine on non-x86 arches and non-Linux systems.

avifile is mostly a dead project, needing CVS snapshots to be updated, its maintainership was made harder by being incompatible with newer versions of ffmpeg. Packages depending on it are being modified not to use it or pending removal with avifile itself.