Use VP9+Opus on MKV by default #198
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Conan-Kudo
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@bhepple confirmed for me this works as expected, so I'm opening this for review. |
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It seems fine to me to add the default paramts for vp9, but why does this have to be changed upstream? Can't fedora packagers override the defaults? That's why they are defined as meson options. EDIT: It also seems ok to me to add a new meson option for whether the default filename should be a .mp4 or .mkv, seems a better solution than changing one hardcoded value to another. |
Default params are in #197 and needed so it works properly when the user selects vp9, I'm just stacking on top for changing the actual defaults used.
I can certainly make the container default configurable too. Though, my plea is that the upstream default should use royalty free codecs because it's better for the user, distributor, and the ecosystem at large. We should promote formats that aren't encumbered and cause problems for people depending on where they are. |
Using high-quality royalty-free codecs by default makes this usable in many more environments by default. In particular, distributions like Fedora and openSUSE have limited builds of FFmpeg that do not include encumbered codecs. This change makes it usable for them out of the box by default without breaking broad support anywhere else.
wf-recorder is being added to the main Fedora repositories.
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This allows configuration of the file format if a distributor wants to use a different default from mkv.
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Thanks! |
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I'm not sure this is a good change, most users expect their videos to work on the web but most mobile apps and even a lot of instant messaging apps such as Facebook/Whatsapp/Line/Discord/Twitter only support h264 (and vp8 in some cases). It's fine to add sensible defaults for libvpx but I don't agree with the change that wf-recorder should default to using VP9+Opus and the mkv container. Someone who's not familiar with video codecs uploading their video on Facebook and finding out that it doesn't work for some mysterious reason is going to cause more issues than someone using a specific Linux distro that doesn't happen to have hardware decoding for a certain video codec. Fedora should set these options at build time, there's no need for upstream to change defaults to suit one distro while causing issues for the majority |
So I just did some testing the services I do have:
I can change the default to VP8+Vorbis WebM, which works across all these services. It also matches the default for GNOME and other desktops that have built-in screen recording. |
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I think GNOME's default should be good enough for us. |
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These changes just came through to arch and broke my workflow, which until today relied on the default being mp4. It's no trouble for me to look up the right combination of command flags to switch it back to something that I can use, but please note that changing the default behaviour has huge effects on your users that we do not expect from a minor version release. |
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I'm not sure I agree with @Conan-Kudo 's reasoning that if all these social media platforms support webm, that makes it a sensible default. Who screenrecords and upload without at least TRIMMING the start and end of the video? I would recommend considering editor support when deciding these things. Consider what your users are actually doing with the files. Are they uploading them as-is, or are they editing them? Both? |
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@0atman The change was later reverted, the default in 0.4 is libx264 again. Though downstream distros might have changed the defaults (though that isn't something I can influence). Edit: The container format did change though. |
This PR stacks on top of #197 to change the default for wf-recorder to use only royalty-free codecs by default.
Fixes #196