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I am a new vlc fan and browsed the code of vlc 0.9.5a.

I have one question on the relation between vlc and ffmpeg.

In the vlc source code directory, vlc has dumux directory which does the almost all container demux and codec directory which does the av decode stuff.

Since vlc already supported code to demux and decode, why when configure vlc still needs ffmpeg library like libavformat and libavcodec. It makes me much confused.

One simple question, if vlc decode one stream which can be done by vlc own code and by ffmpeg, which path it will go vlc own demux/decode path or ffmpeg demux/decode path.

Sorry to ask this stupid question.

VLC is a framework, in fact, and has many modules.

One decoding module is the avcodec one that uses libavcodec. It decodes many codecs that you NEED with VLC.

For demuxing, VLC has already most of the demuxer in itself, but there is one module that can use libavformat exotic formats power to demux them.

So, you don't need FFmpeg, but I think you really need at least the avcodec module.

Thanks a lot. I will dig more on source code to see.

still have one question which is not clear for me:

if I configure vlc to --enable-ffmpeg, when play one .avi file:

vlc will use its own avi demux or ffmpeg's libavformat to demux

for avi, own demux.
If you want to force ffmpeg demuxing, --demux ffmpeg at runtime.

thanks a lot