So one of the problems I am encountering these days is that I want to use this nice package spotDL in my Debian 10 Buster system. But unfortunately spotDL depends on the fmmpeg version of 4.2 but Debian Buster stable is currently only supporting 4.1.6.

To tackle this issue first I made a horrible mistake of trying to add the testing repositories to my sources.list file as suggested in several sources. Of course, mixing testing and stable is something only a beginner such as me will do. As soon as, I run upgraded my upgrade list, I prompted with a question. One should REALLY REALLY read and know what these questions are asking, especially if you are dealing with your sources.list. This was not the case with me and my system starts a full update from testing repositories! Certainly I already created a FrankenDebian. Let’s check what the authors on this infamous page says:

First of all, apt-get upgrade default behavior is to upgrade any installed package to the highest available version. If, for example, you configure the bullseye archive on a buster system, APT will try to upgrade almost all packages to bullseye.

Smart people. I will update later on how I was able to not totally break up my system but I downgraded most of the packages with the command:

$ sudo apt-get install <package-name>/buster

I learned my lesson in hard way. Then, I come across with very nice thing called backports. I added up the the repository for backports

$ deb http://deb.debian.org/debian buster-backports main
$ sudo apt-get update

And run the command for installation of backports version of ffmpeg, only to find ou that it just doesn’t exists.

$ sudo apt-get install ffmpeg/buster-backports

Now the next step was to decide if I should fully upgrade to bullseye, testing version. I thought probably it will be way too hard and it will be the case that my non-Debian packages will/can be gone. As this is not a server but a personal computer, I rely heavily on my kind of non-Debian packages. I really do not have any idea, how server side deals with this, but that is not the issue here.

So I come across with the idea, that you can backport packages my yourself. I will try this in near future, even though it looks pretty complicated.

Edit:

So it was way much more easy than I understand. In this thread, the solution is given:

sudo apt remove ffmpeg
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jonathonf/ffmpeg-4
sudo apt install ffmpeg
ffmpeg -version