FFdshow Linux port issues

I do believe that FFDShow is just the FFMPEG library with hooks to Directshow on Windows. The library should be available to any player and I think MPlayer, VLC and Xine can use it's stuff now at least to some extent.

So far all the major media players have built their own engines. There are frameworks out there (mlt, gstreamer), but for some reason thay remain unpopular. KDE4 will include a new API that will be able to use xine or gstreamer as its backend.

Mplayer has a chained plugin system, but doesn't have as many plugins as ffdshow. Xine also has a chained plugin system, but is less featureful than mplayer. Nobody has the UI right (to the point of being tragically comical).

Troubleshooter is right though, ffdshow is actually a [i[Windows[/i] port of a Linux library. Most of the Linux players use ffmpeg for decoding and encoding some types of audio and video.

The FFmpeg project includes the libraries: libpostproc and libswscale. Whether ffdshow is using those exclusively, not using them, or has augmented them is an entirely different question. I have no idea -- ffdshow info isn't particularly easy to ascertain. Then again, what are the Linux media players using? FFmpeg's libraries? Their own? Augmentations of FFmpeg's libraries? I would guess exclusively FFmpeg's (especially in the case of MPlayer...Xine may have implemented some of their own).

MPlayer has a myriad of command line options (which, of course, can also be added to the config file), but that gets to the point: the "need to expose the ffdshow-like video processing controls/options in a GUI config panel"

Its likely that this has been discussed on the various mail lists (FFmpeg's, MPlayer's, Xine's, VLC's, ffdshow's, ...) before, so perhaps a more definitive answer can be provided from a search from them.

Alternatively, I suppose one could look at the code.