Mplayer Deps.

[n0dalus]

On 1/22/06, David Nielsen <gnomeuser at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> What I "love" about MPlayer the most is their deep hatred of users, if
> there is a bug one is instructed to compile CVS - great way to treat
> testers really, if the solution to all bugs was compiling CVS my system
> would be in a most interesting state now.

Firstly, mplayer does not have deep hatred of users. That is absurd.
Mplayer is not the first open source project to instruct users filing
bug reports to try running CVS. With bugs being fixed all the time,
and with FFmpeg being updated by non-mplayer developers it's easier
for them to just say 'Try see if it's fixed in CVS'. This is not
unreasonable.

Secondly, mplayer's CVS is kept quite stable in comparison to other
projects. The solution to many frequently reported bugs in mplayer may
be simply to upgrade. It's not like you're suddenly going to be
running a less stable version of mplayer -- I've found CVS is often
more stable than their latest release.

> Regardless of this MPlayer has serious patent infrigement problems and
> the design of their system makes it unsuitable for packaging with Fedora

Yep, like many other OSS multimedia players. I don't think it's hard
to disable these when you compile it.

> - I would warmly recommend using Totem with Gstreamer 0.10, Fluendo is
> currently beta testing plugins for the various patented formats,
> although these are for pay, you will be on the right side of the law and
> they will run on all common platforms (i386, x86-64 and PPC). Something
> that can't really be done with the model MPlayer is taking (I believe
> they run illegally obtained codec dlls from Windows via a wine wrapper).

I don't think they aren't doing anything illegal. Yes they have a
wrapper so you can use Windows .dll codecs, but you don't have to
download or use them. The non-free .dll files are only available as a
seperate package. (The download itself of these files may not be legal
in your country, but you are free to collect the files manually from
an installed and licensed Windows system and put them into Linux.)

Mplayer can play many more formats than Totem, and has many more
features. If people want to sign contracts with Fluendo and package
mplayer to use their code, they should do so.

Please don't spread FUD.

n0dalus.