[duskwuff]

The actual history of the projects doesn't bear that theory out. Aside from the rename itself and a couple of minor API changes, the projects stayed pretty close together, and a lot of patches got copied between the pair.

ffmpeg is a fairly complex project which deals with a number of esoteric topics (audio/video file formats, compression, processing, etc). The number of open-source developers who are qualified to work on it, and who have the time and inclination to do so, is fairly limited; I suspect that there simply isn't a large enough population of those developers to support multiple actively developed projects in this space, and certainly not two as similar as ffmpeg/libav were.

[TheCycoONE]

Patches were copied one way, and functionality was deprecated in ffmpeg but the only way to do it in libav (audio.) As someone who was writing software using the ffmpeg/libav apis it was a horrible confusing mess. Since distros were split you had to support both and the each had different quirks. It was a dark time that I'm glad is over.