Could the Krita snap make use of the ffmpeg stage snaps? It doesn’t seem to ship ffmpeg currently (and therefore it’s not possible to render animations with the snap version):
This post by a Krita developer says that it’s not possible due to legal issues.
Im wondering why that is since Krita is GPL-licensed (?). I assume it’s more complicated than that? Thanks in advance!
Follow-up question: if this is indeed not possible due to legal issues: would it be possible to create some sort of interface which allows the Krita snap to access a local ffmpeg installation?
I suspect this isn’t about the copyright issues; ffmpeg also has potential patent issues. Some of the ffmpeg decoders probably infringe on active patents, so bundling ffmpeg with your application might require paying for a patent license. The patent license issues are explained at the bottom if this page: https://www.ffmpeg.org/legal.html
I assume Canonical has some sort of agreement in place to license some of these patents. There are a bunch of snaps created by canonical employees which contain ffmpeg, so I’m not sure how that works legally. Maybe @popey or @Wimpress can comment on this since they worked on the ffmpeg snap?
The browsers use the chromium-ffmpeg content snap which provides libffmpeg.so. @oSoMoN might be able to give more information about whether this can only be used by browsers or also by other applications.
I would totally bundle ffmpeg inside the krita snap.
I’ll create a merge request and see what they say. @popey do you have any more information that I can use to convince the Krita developers?
I’m not a lawyer, so cannot give legal advice. However, I’d point out the snap store hosts numerous other snaps which contain ffmpeg either from the repository or built from source.
Maybe it would also be easier to convince them if it could indeed reuse a content snap?
Krita accepted the MR to add ffmpeg to the snap: https://invent.kde.org/kde/krita/merge_requests/156
However, the Krita snap is currently quite a few releases out of date, so I’m not sure when the new snap will be available. I’ll see if there is something I can help with to get these packages published again.
@TimSueberkrueb ffmpeg support is now live in the stable channel. Let me know if you experience any other issues.
Awesome, thank you very much!
Hey, I can indeed confirm that the problem is fixed. Thanks!
