On 27/06/2012 14:41, Jonathan Wiltshire wrote:
On 2012-06-27 14:19, Colin Law wrote:

I use get-iplayer 2.80 on Ubuntu 12.04 from the ubuntu repository, but
I see that I have flvstreamer 2.1c1 installed and rtmpdump is not
installed.  The comment above suggests that this is not ideal, does
this mean that the packaging on Ubuntu is not ideal and that it should
install rtmpdump and not flvstreamer?

This stems from about January when I made flvstreamer an 'or' dependency
along with rtmpdump, though the package manager will be satisfied if
rtmpdump is already installed or you try to install it at the same
time as get-iplayer. If neither of these is true though it will choose
flvstreamer by default, which I assume is what's happened to you.

To be honest I'm not sure what to do about this and I'd welcome
input from testers about how well flvstreamer/rtmpdump work so I can
make the right choice for Wheezy. Bear in mind that tests must be
of the versions in Wheezy and not third-party packages though, and that
we freeze in the next few days.

The only appreciable difference I have ever noticed between the stock versions of flvstreamer and rtmpdump in Ubuntu (and in testing on Wheezy) is the expected stream dropping/resuming of flvstreamer because of SWF Verification. But I haven't used flvstreamer enough to assess if it was more likely to produce "non-monotonic timestamps" errors in ffmpeg due to all the dropping/resuming.

My view is that since I'm paying for the bandwidth to stream video, why would I use an application that I know is going to continually cut in and out? Another consideration is that flvstreamer is not very likely to receive future updates. If the BBC makes some changes in Flash streaming that required changes in client applications, rtmpdump would be far more likely to get an upgrade.

I would vote for dropping flvstreamer as a dependency. It's confusing enough the the flvstreamer option value defaults to rtmpdump, so it might be good to hide that oddity by switching to rtmpdump only. However, I would guess there are at least a few people who prefer flvstreamer for reasons of habit or ideology. If that is a consideration, then perhaps just make rtmpdump the default since new users are unlikely to have either one already installed? The Wheezy rtmpdump build is fairly current, so it should serve get_iplayer for some time to come.

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