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  1. Apparently I don't have the required credentials to post a poll in the dedicated category, so I'll put this here.

    Considering the staggering amount of Windows video and audio editing / converting / downloading tools which come with their own copy of ffmpeg (often making the bulk of the utility's total size), I commented about a year ago on the fact that it can add serious clutter to the system partition, and also lead to unpredictable results as the version being actually executed when typing a “ffmpeg” command without specifying the complete path is not necessarily the most recent (as I recently found out).

    So how many distinct instances of ffmpeg (.exe or .dll) can you find on your system, for what total size ? How old is the oldest one ? (Last year I found 17 instances for a total size of 751,8MB. By now it's probably above 900MB. Counting the equally redundant instances of (lib)avcodec could double the total.)
    At this point it would be welcome to have yet another tool to manage this mess, keeping only the most recent version (with an option to automatically update it), and replacing all others by hard links — if someone feels up to the task of writing something like this...
    As far as I know Linux systems don't have that kind of issue (only one version of any given utility is installed in a specific place and any other tool relying on it calls it from that place — sorry for the Bill Gates “the thing that does the thing” kind of talk). Don't know how MacOS and other operating systems behave in that regard.
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    I have 8 copies of ffmpeg exe or dll. Four of those I installed and 4 came with other software. Total size < 185 MB, nothing close to the nearly 1TB of dotNet crap.

    ffmpeg's APIs are not backwards compatible across major versions so you couldn't necessarily replace all instances with a single hard link though you could probably get it down to 2 or 3.

    Since most people using Linux only install software from the distribution's package repositories they are unlikely to run into problems like you describe with ffmpeg. But you can certainly have more than one version of a program on Linux.
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  3. ...nothing close to the nearly 1TB of dotNet crap.
    Hopefully you mean 1GB, right ? O_O (Still using Windows 7 here, and the total size of the partition is 100GB (about 95% full which is not ideal I know), so 1TB just for the “dotNet crap” seems insanely huge.)

    ffmpeg's APIs are not backwards compatible across major versions so you couldn't necessarily replace all instances with a single hard link though you could probably get it down to 2 or 3.
    Good to know, but a reasonably up-to-date software relying on ffmpeg should get its routines adapted to work with the latest major version, shouldn't it ?

    Since most people using Linux only install software from the distribution's package repositories they are unlikely to run into problems like you describe with ffmpeg. But you can certainly have more than one version of a program on Linux.
    Alright, thanks for this precision.
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    ...nothing close to the nearly 1TB of dotNet crap.
    Hopefully you mean 1GB, right ? O_O (Still using Windows 7 here, and the total size of the partition is 100GB (about 95% full which is not ideal I know), so 1TB just for the “dotNet crap” seems insanely huge.)
    Correct, 1 GB not TB.

    ffmpeg's APIs are not backwards compatible across major versions so you couldn't necessarily replace all instances with a single hard link though you could probably get it down to 2 or 3.
    Good to know, but a reasonably up-to-date software relying on ffmpeg should get its routines adapted to work with the latest major version, shouldn't it ?
    I have some software that will never be updated again but it works fine as is. Keeping an extra copy or two of a fairly small binary is not a problem.

    (Last year I found 17 instances for a total size of 751,8MB. By now it's probably above 900MB. Counting the equally redundant instances of (lib)avcodec could double the total.)
    That does seem excessive. I assume that the main reason that they distribute ffmpeg along with their program is to insure that there is compatible version available. I believe that most of those packages you refer to are aimed at simplifying the experience and requiring the end user to install a copy of ffmpeg separately would defeat the purpose.
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  5. Member Budman1's Avatar
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    5
    One in the 'fmpeg Latest Folder' with my system settings set so my system always knows where FFmpeg resides.
    one on desktop because I do a lot of testing on my easy to locate desktop.
    One in each 'work' folders of my 3 current projects.

    Total=266 MB
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    i run Linux and am not downloading all those various packages. it's standard in the Linux community to not include other projects like that, especially if it comes builtin like ffmpeg does in desktop-intended editions of Linux. an edition of Linux for a server should not have any copies of ffmpeg by default but you usually can install one copy if you want to do background work on your server with it.
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