Because all shared libraries should be in PATH, it's not useful to ask user for libraries' location when shared build is used, while with static build it may be necessary. When using static FFmpeg, Audacity only loads one library and imports everything from it. My guess is that Linux users would prefer shared FFmpeg, since they have superior package managing system, while on Windows it's easier to drop static FFmpeg build into Audacity and forget about packages.įrom Audacity's point of view there's only one difference: when using shared FFmpeg, Audacity has to load each function from respective library, and each library has to be mapped into Audacity process memory by separate wxDynamicLibrary object. Static build is usually stored somewhere within application's directory as some kind of plug-in. This is also necessary because libraries depend on each other. Valid system-wide FFmpeg package is usually shared, and resides somewhere in PATH, so any application is able to load functions from any of these libraries.

Shared build results in a few libraries (and these libraries may depend on other non-FFmpeg libraries), each library exports different functions. Static build results in one big library, that contains all functions from FFmpeg package.

It's not yet clear which build of FFmpeg will be used - static or shared. This allows FFmpeg to be optional (Audacity will run without FFmpeg) and it could be distributed separately (removes licensing issues).

Note that details of the documentation or of the project implementation itself may change over time.Īs a design decision, FFmpeg libraries are being linked dynamically and loaded at run time. User documentation was produced by the student and has been incorporated into appropriate pages in the Audacity Manual.

While FFmpeg also has other uses, this is outside the scope of this project. In Audacity FFmpeg will be used to import and export audio data.

4.1 Importing and Exporting using the Audacity-recommended version of FFmpegįFmpeg is a set of libraries for audio/video encoding/decoding/muxing/demuxing/processing/capturing.

Audacity ffmpeg library 2.2.2 setup