[gentoo-desktop] ffmpeg versions in portage

[Brent Busby]

With all the arguing I see in the forums lately about libav versus 
ffmpeg, I thought I'd ask an ffmpeg question of a different nature:

Upstream, the ffmpeg people are releasing 2.5 as "stable."  Some people 
(who I'm not going to argue with, since I don't really have a position 
on it myself) say the ffmpeg developers are reckless.  However, I notice 
that most other distros are at least shipping 2.2 (perhaps with lots of 
distro patches to fix problems?).

Gentoo's stable ffmpeg is currently 1.2.6, a fully maintained (i.e., not 
defunct or deprecated) branch with ffmpeg upstream, apparently 
maintained for really conservative users.

All of this has me wondering...should I unmask?  Both 2.2 and 2.5 are 
available in Portage as ~amd64 ebuilds.  Is anyone here doing this? 
Does it unleash the hounds of hell (or the UNIX equivalent, lots of 
unpleasant segfaults and codec problems)?  I'm mostly wanting better 
Bluray/WMV3/VC-1 support, but I don't know how that stands between the 
various 1.2/2.2/2.5 branches.

From talking to people who don't run Gentoo, I've found that it has a 
reputation for being bleeding-edge, but at times, I've found to the 
contraty that it can actually sometimes be overcautious, making it hard 
to tell if you're missing out on things other distros are enjoying 
because your upgrades are masked.  Sometimes, package versions will stay 
masked for months or years just because nobody got around to marking 
them stable for amd64 and not because of any actual bugs.

Anybody running ffmpeg 2.x without issues?  If so, which one...2.2 or 
2.5?

-- 
+ Brent A. Busby	 + "We've all heard that a million monkeys
+ Sr. UNIX Systems Admin +  banging on a million typewriters will
+ University of Chicago	 +  eventually reproduce the entire works of
+ James Franck Institute +  Shakespeare.  Now, thanks to the Internet,
+ Materials Research Ctr +  we know this is not true." -Robert Wilensky