Comment 9 for bug 1020856

This bug merits the "opinion" status. If ffmpeg was chosen to be in the Debian/Ubuntu repositories, there would be (without a doubt) another set of users who would have opened bugs complaining that libav should be in the repositories because of opinions X, Y, Z, and so on.

Libav was chosen to be in the repositories. There are emails in Ubuntu's technical board mailing list and in Debian's mailing lists explaining why libav was chosen. If anyone really wants to see ffmpeg in the repositories, then ffmpeg or libav or both have to rename their libraries.

And about ffmpeg stability, ffmpeg is practically all of libav's codebase with extra features merged in. If ffmpeg is stable, it is thanks to libav.