Comment 17 for bug 602934

Benjamin,

So where are we now? We have your patch attached to bug 233 which appears to
work on Ubuntu using the Ubuntu-distributed FFmpeg (leaving aside the WMA
crashes in Bug 274 and possible licensing issues from build-time linkage). I
and a couple of other people could never make the patch attached to this bug
work on Ubuntu when self-compiling FFmpeg and building Audacity with default
./configure. There was always "undefined symbol:match_ext" error when loading
FFmpeg from Preferences. The patch did not cause a problem on Windows -
Audacity still recognised the libs from the FFmpeg installer we supply.

However we still have the previous reports
(http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=39251) where people loading
latest FFmpeg from Audacity Preferences found Audacity does not recognise
legitimate FFmpeg-supported files on import, showing "av_open_input_file()
failed" in Help > Show Log. I assume your patch attached to bug 233 will not
address that if you do not set USE_SYSTEM_FFMPEG. What happens in your bug 233
patch if user uninstalls Ubuntu's FFmpeg or otherwise sets SVN FFmpeg as the
system FFmpeg, then sets USE_SYSTEM_FFMPEG? Is there some way you can test such
a scenario? If FFmpeg files are not recognised in that case then it seems we
need a new bug for that.

Fixing bug 176 but not bug 233 seems less controversial to me. If we are going
to address 233 at all it would "seem" more convenient to address 176 by
applying the bug 233 patch, but might it be safer to separate them anyway?
I have more comments in bug233#c11 .