[Discuss] Comparison KDE and Gnome (metacity) with ffmpeg in Ubuntu

[Murray Strome]

Let me preface this by noting that Ubuntu has dropped ffmpeg from its 
repositories. On one of my computers, when I "upgraded" to 14.04 it quit 
working (this was quite a while ago). Since I had a working version of 
12.04 on that computer, and avconv (the Ubuntu preferred "equivalent" to 
ffmpeg) worked well I was not in any great hurry to fix 14.04.
However, the HD with Windows 7 and 14.04 was beginning to show signs of 
old age, so I decided to replace it before it failed. This involved 
cloning the Windows 7 C partition and creating partitions for a new 
install of 14.04. I am running KDE on another computer, so thought I 
would install that. I installed a Western Digital Black HD, which is 
about the only one that still has a five year manufacturer's warranty.

First thing I noticed was that neither ffmpeg or avconv were in the 
repositories. However, if I installed winff, avconv gets installed. 
However, it still does not work for me -- all kinds of problems but 
bottom line is that it is useless (I have reported this but developers 
seem to think there is nothing wrong). Winff doesn't work either.

I then installed ffmpeg following the instructions at:
https://launchpad.net/~jon-severinsson/+archive/ubuntu/ffmpeg?field.series_filter=trusty

In KDE, when I run ffmpeg it starts out OK but the conversion rate was 
only about 13 frames per second, and it just stalled after converting 
only about 4 minutes of video.

I was going to reboot into 12.04 but decided to first try loading some 
other windows manager.  I just logged in using Gnome Flashback 
(Metacity) and it looks quite good to me. But what REALLY amazed me is 
that when I ran ffmpeg (with exactly the same parameters as I had used 
in KDE on the same computer), the conversion rate was about 180-195 fps. 
Under 12.04, it was around 60-70, so nearly triple the speed.

I am not really sure what this might mean for other programs, but I was 
really surprised and amazed by this!

I don't really understand why Ubuntu continues to push avconv, which no 
longer works. The original reason seemed to have something to do with 
using libav, but ffmpeg uses that now as well. I have never been able to 
get a straight answer (or even any answer at all) from the Ubuntu or 
avconv developers.

Murray