mdale wrote:

Because WebM encoder improvements are ongoing, generally the "latest release" is best. Likewise with ffmpeg2theora, latest release is best. Because ffmpeg does not do regular releases and Ubuntu packages can get behind with both ffmpeg and ffmpeg2theora, its probably best to build from source.

Maybe Jan publishes the versions of ffmpeg that he tests before updating the ffmpeg2theora release?

He has a build script that can be invoked via:
bzr branch http://firefogg.org/dev/firefogg_buildd

Maybe a small modification to that build script could pull from a known stable version of the repository instead of the latest?

As a practical matter for deployment we'll reaaaalllllyyyy want packages so the puppet & apt infrastructure can deal with keeping them up to date on the image scalers (or would we even have dedicated video transcoder machines?).

If we have to compile those packages ourselves so be it, but that increases the burden on ops, especially if there's a need to make ongoing updates.

mdale wrote:

I believe the idea is that we have dedicated transcoding machines for the derivatives. Ryan Lane mentioned we have transcoding boxes from a while back when we first took a pass at getting transcoding support deployed. Is that still the "opts plan" Ryan?

I imagine thumbnails will be generated on image scales and would need the ffmpeg package there.

We have these nice static binaries here:
http://firefogg.org/nightly/

or we could easily create a PPA that integrates well into apt infrastructure ( something like ) https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ffmpeg2theora

Jan do you already have an official PPA for ffmpeg2theora / ffmpeg ( with latest vpx support ) ?

...or we could work harder to ensure the upstream packages are up-to-date :P

I will defer to Jan here since he does development / releases of at least ffmpeg2theora. And probably could help us setup something like wmf ffmpeg PPA if that is ideal for Ops.

mdale wrote:

added explicit mention of minimum versions in r90079.

We can directly support deployment via PPAs or via the static binaries for ffmpeg2theora, in the case of ffmpeg ubuntu includes a base version. But we will probably want to run more bleeding edge for maximum webm quality so we should use the static binaries, a PPA, or "build it ourselves".