Comment 3 for bug 163707

Ok, long story short after applying above patch and doing some source-foo I got it to build against system ffmpeg in Hardy and Gutsy pbuilder and tested playback of several media types with Totem Gstreamer with great success. However, the debdiff is a bit dirty and I seek guidance/review. Yes, it's 16K lines long, most of which are due to cruft from running autoreconf recursing into the bundled ffmpeg and generating spurious changes.

Rest assured that debian/patches/24_use-system-ffmpeg.patch is nothing more than the small patch from upstream as linked in the original bug description plus a autoreconf run.

I did the API migrations in debian/patches/25_ffmpeg-api-changes.patch so that we can regenerate #24 properly with less monstrosity later on.

 So, the TODO list left is:

(1) Removal of bundled ffmpeg from sources? Should we repack the orig.tar.gz to remove the bundled ffmpeg as it's the cause of the huge debdiff and it's unnneded code.
(2) Versioned ffmpeg build-deps? I have no idea what range of ffmpegs this API will be valid for, do we need to put a versioned dep or not? Currently I left them unversioned.
(3) Additional testing? I've only tested playback of H.264+AAC, MPEG4-ASP(Xvid)+MP3 in totem-gstreamer. I don't feel satisfied with these test cases. How else can we test this package?

#1 and #2 need to be addressed before uploading this anywhere, but I think #3 can be tested in Hardy repos since we still are very early in development and there's no apparent signs of mass breakage.