Summary

Remove support for libavcodec 53 and 55.

Problem

Currently JavaFX Media supports libavcodec 53-57 and its variant ffmpeg 56-57. To support each major version of this library we building and shipping separate libavplugin-X.so wrapper which uses this library. Separate wrappers are needed due to difference in libavcodec APIs between major versions. Libavcodec 53 is default library on Ubuntu 11.10-13.10 which are not supported platforms by Java 11. Version 55 was never available as default library on Ubuntu. OLE 7 does not support any libavcodec libraries by default and it is know to work with 54 and 56. Building and shipping unnecessary libavplugin-X.so wrapper takes time, SQE resources and increases JDK binary footprint.

Solution

We will stop building libav 53 and 55 stubs and wrappers. Modify JavaFX Media code to stop looking for this libraries when initializing media stack. Also, we will release note removal of libavcodec 53 and 55 support.

Specification

We do not have any specs which mention which versions of libavcodec we supporting. Our documentation only mentions to install libavcodecX or equivalent.

[1] http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javafx/downloads/supportedconfigurations-1506746.html