Someone recently asked on the ffmpeg-devel mailing list for nightly binary builds of FFmpeg and its associated libraries to be made available for download. The idea seemed to gain traction on the list so I began thinking of how we can make this a reality. Since FATE clients are already building FFmpeg binaries day and night, it’s not a huge leap to consider extending the infrastructure slightly to include packaging the binaries and sending them to a central server. So let’s talk process:

• After building binaries as part of FATE, make a compressed bundle (.tar.bz2 for Unix, .zip for Windows) and ship the package right here to multimedia.cx. Hey, I have the space to spare (an alleged 500 GB with the current hosting plan, of which I am currently barely using 6 GB, and nearly half of that is FATE data). I also have FTP account options which should facilitate transfer.
• The filename would follow the naming convention of “ffmpeg-bin-svn-OS-arch-compiler.ext”. So, for example, the build of SVN 18005 from Linux / x86_32 / gcc 4.2.4 would be: ffmpeg-bin-svn18005-linux-x86_32-gcc-4.2.4.tar.bz2.
• What should be in the package? The FFmpeg binary programs and the associated libraries, of course. But in what hierarchy? A flat hierarchy doesn’t strike me as a good idea (unzip and potentially trash existing files in your current directory). Instead, package the files in, e.g., ffmpeg-svn18005-linux-x86_32-gcc-4.2.4/.
• There should be a standard, auto-generated README.txt file in the same directory. Actually, perhaps it should be a simple HTML file since I envision it should contain — in addition to basic information such as its revision and the time it was built — a report of which tests passed and which failed, along with links to each report in the FATE database.
• Create a web interface that allows users to browse among the latest FFmpeg binary builds. Out of everything presented in this brainstorm, this is the step that actually gives me some pause since I don’t exactly know how I would implement it off the top of my head.

Feedback welcome. Otherwise, these are likely to be the decisions I run with for the first iteration of this plan, when I get around to it (think of this as the public comment period).