Like jbk, I'd like to hope it will happen, but the combination of significant tribalism, plus the very different development philosophies may prevent this.
For the merging to happen, there would have to be both some agreement on the technical direction of the two projects, as well as some sort of social resolution, which would likely involve some maintainers of one fork or the other leaving.
Regardless, from my point of view, it seems unsustainable to keep on merging from libav to ffmpeg at the pace that Michael has been doing, so the projects will end up diverging enough at one point that momentum ends up behind one or the other.
For the merging to happen, there would have to be both some agreement on the technical direction of the two projects, as well as some sort of social resolution, which would likely involve some maintainers of one fork or the other leaving.
Regardless, from my point of view, it seems unsustainable to keep on merging from libav to ffmpeg at the pace that Michael has been doing, so the projects will end up diverging enough at one point that momentum ends up behind one or the other.