There exists no configure.ac for ffmpeg. They don't like autoconf, just look at their handwritten configure script :)

How are you doing "autogen"? autoreconf or gnome-autogen.sh? Or the one from CVS?

Beginning from next release the autogen.sh will be shipped with the tarballs... and this autogen.sh should work. I'll close this bug now, if there's something wrong with the autogen.sh from CVS please reopen :)

Our build system enforces a re-autogen (because we cross compile to non-Intel architectures, existing configure scripts are often out of date) so we call autoreconf after extracting the tarball.  With gst-ffmpeg this results in this:

| autoreconf: configure.ac: adding subdirectory gst-libs/ext/ffmpeg to autoreconf
...
| autoreconf: running: gnu-configize
| gnu-configize: `configure.ac' or `configure.in' is required

Because you use AC_CONFIG_SUBDIRS() to run the ffmpeg configure script, but autoreconf believes that means that it needs to generate it in that directory too.

Whether this is a bug in autoconf or gst-ffmpeg is debatable.  The autoconf manpage says AC_CONFIG_SUBDIRS runs the "configure script" in the directory but doesn't say that it needs to be an autoconf script for bootstrapping.

Could you check what is different from running autoreconf and the autogen.sh in gst-ffmpeg CVS?

Ah I see, autoreconf trys to run itself in all AC_CONFIG_SUBDIRS().

Well, either run autogen.sh in your build system or call autoreconf with --no-recursive for gst-ffmpeg.

I don't think there's anything we can do about that here.

gst-ffmpeg no longer uses AC_CONFIG_SUBDIRS(), so this is no longer relevant.