What is the benefit? Why is this valuable?

Background: Qt 6 Multimedia supports a number of graphics APIs such as macOS/iOS: AVFoundation, Linux: GStreamer, Windows: WMF, Android: Android Java API

Problem statement: All graphics API do not support the same lower level features such as seeking in the same way -> we get bug reports that we can’t fix and end up using a lot of extra time for multimedia features, and have inconsistent feature set

Proposed solution:

Introduce support for a new multimedia backend, FFMPEG which supports a cross-platform API for the low-level features and can be used on all platforms: Linux, Windows, Mac, iOS and Android. This would make Qt6 multimedia much more maintainable.

Implication is that we need to integrate codecs into our release packages as FFMPEG includes codecs. Exceptions are codecs with significant licence cost, such as H.264 and H.265. There codecs are not shipped but we rely on codecs in hardware devices.

What are common use cases?

All Qt6 multimedia use cases
›Audio playback and recording
›Video playback and recording

Technical information

https://ffmpeg.org/