14 DAY TRIAL // The Debian project is finally making the move to FFmpeg from Libav, and it looks like things are settled. It will take a while for the transition to take place, but it's happening nonetheless.
Regular users won't really care whether Debian is using Libav or FFMpeg, but that doesn't the make the change any less important. The proposal was made a while back, and there are some very good arguments for making this decision. The main one seems to revolve around security, as FFmpeg is way ahead of Libav in this respect. Debian must put security above all other considerations, so its move is not really all that surprising.
Debian has gone through some major changes in the past year, like temporary desktop environment switches, the entire Systemd story, and now the move to FFmpeg, although to be fair, this will probably raise the least amount of issues. It’s hard to argue with anyone about this decision when FFmpeg has all the arguments on its side.
FFmpeg is coming to Debian "Stretch"
The next edition of Debian will be called Stretch, the 9.x branch. It's unstable, and it will take a while to get the ball rolling, but it is going to be implemented soon.
"After a careful review of all the pros and cons we, the Debian Multimedia Maintainers team, have finally decided to switch from Libav to FFmpeg as provider for the libav* multimedia libraries. We'll try our best to make this happen in time for stretch. Finally we want to thank very much Reinhard Tartler for the tremendous efforts he put in place while serving as both upstream developer and Debian's primary maintainer for Libav in the past 4 years. We all owe him a great debt of gratitude for that," said Alessio Treglia from Debian Multimedia Maintainers team.
The arguments for the move to FFmpeg were presented some time ago, and you can check our original report for more details about this transition.