Except I'm on no side in this fight: we use both, have friends in both side, and we host FFmpeg's git. I may be not 100% objective, but I'm more objective than a developer from one of the side.
The fork is hurting us a lot. It means a lot of work.
Given what I've read from the stories, and taking into account the rhetoric employed by one side versus the other, I have to say that, at least in tone, FFMpeg struck me as being more mature about the whole affair.
> I have to say that, at least in tone, FFMpeg struck me as being more mature about the whole affair.
same here. And regardless of what their codebase smells like, their stuff works and does what it says on the tin, letting people play whatever format there is out there on a massive amount of different systems. I'm the first to admit the dialogs they're using to configure the codecs is one which is a yearly 'Ugliest UI' award winner, but luckily others have made front ends which make you avoid all that mess in the first place.
It might hurt you but it looks like it doesn't hurt you enough that you decide 'pick a side and stick with it'. What I don't understand is why you don't simply pick ffmpeg and be done with it? E.g. it's good enough for playing whatever format on windows using WMP, so why isn't it enough for you to play whatever is out there using VLC?
distro packagers typically undo vendoring for lots of reasons (among others: smaller packages, fixes propagate automatically, which is particularly important with security issue)
Given how similar libav and ffmpeg still are in places, they might even consider replacing the vendored ffmpeg with the packaged libav (or vice versa, if done the other way).
But the fallout would be for VLC to deal with ("VLC breaks on my Debian, it must be crap").
The fork is hurting us a lot. It means a lot of work.