At present, Chromium installs without libffmpegsumo.so as per Gentoo's policies against bundled libraries. Chromium bundles ffmpeg-mt, which is a multithreaded version of ffmpeg. People on systems using multicore systems might prefer the bundled version for performance reasons. http://spectralhole.blogspot.com/2010/08/why-you-dont-want-to-build-you-chromium.html Could a bundled-ffmpeg use flag could be introduced so that people can decide whether or not they want to use the bundled library?
I don't think it's a good idea. The points below roughly correspond to the points from the cited blog post. 1. Is there more data than a claim ffmpeg-mt is "much faster"? I'd like to see examples of files and some benchmarks. It is worth noting though that the post author was an FFmpeg developer. 2. I'd like to encourage the Chromium team to get all patches submitted and landed upstream. When people just accept the status quo there are much less incentives to do that. 3. That's not a problem for Gentoo. We can solve it by adjusting dependencies, and if it gets really bad we just switch back to bundled ffmpeg (and then h.264 support is missing, etc, etc).
