I like this guy, but...
by
mrseigen
·
· Score: 5, Informative
...command-line MPlayer works perfectly for me. Aside from that, he certainly lets people know what's wrong with the projects they've spent most of their lives on.
Re:I like this guy, but...
by
Dave_bsr
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Ok, I struggled with getting every supposedly great media player for windows to work right, including iterations of WiMP and Quicktime. Don't talk to me about Realplayer. A different media player for every media.
So here ya go. Mplayer is just a media player. It opens every media you can think of - mplayer [file] and it just works. Period. Set it up to be the default media player in your pretty GUI file manager and you'll never think about it again.
Interaction is a bit different than usual, i'll admit, but it's intuitive and easy once you get used to it. Different != bad. Key-presses are faster than grabbing the mouse and pointing it at something, especially if you're watching a DVD and just want to reach over and slap the spacebar to pause, or hit an arrow key repeatedly to skip forward or back. Mplayer's key mappings are easy to remember and logical - q for quit, f for fullscreen, space for pause, and arrow keys to skip forward and back. You can even adjust audio playback sync to the video, if you learn a bit about it. I'd argue that the average "idiot*" user could learn it and love it just fine - especially since it's one media player, and one interface, for every video (even audio) file on his or her system.
Mplayer GUI's aren't that bad either, whiners...
: )
*Very few are idiots, and many learn fast...don't think that just because you and I can program that means everyone else is retarded.
--
Who is this Anonymous Coward character, how does he post so much, and why is he always such a whore?
He's one of the implementors of the original Netscape on Unix/X11, part of the Mozilla team (IIRC he actually named it Mozilla), and part of the original XEmacs team.
Not to mention xscreensaver (which, I think, ships with every Linux distro out there), and a few other cool hacks.
-- ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
Re:This guy is an idiot
by
Senjutsu
·
· Score: 4, Informative
JWZ should learn how to program and work on his own video player, if he's so unhappy.
So, uh, yeah, JWZ wrote XEmacs (Lucid Emacs), the Unix version of Netscape, and was instrumental in getting the Mozilla project up and running. What the fuck have you done, again?
Does anyone actually play video in a resized window? Surely only "normal" size and fullscreen are ever used? By the way, Windows Media Player up to version 6 at least did the same trick.
Oh, I didn't realize that a shitty "feature" is ok, as long as some old version of windows software did the same thing. After all, the point of any free software project isn't to create an excellent program in its own right, its just to emulate the equivalent windows version, flaws and all, right?
Because of course, mplayer is so hard to remember.
He was responding to the "advice" that to make MPlayer truely usable, he should simply not compile in the UI. You've got to admit, thats a truly, painfully shitty comment on the state of MPlayer's interface. It doesn't matter how easy you think the damn keystrokes are to remember, its still a fucking usability nightmare when the best piece of advice you can get is "Don't even bother to compile the UI"
Re:What a grumpy asshole
by
sfe_software
·
· Score: 4, Informative
If you look for reasons to be unhappy with ANYTHING, you'll find them. Why not focus on what's good and what needs to be improved?
The thing is, he does make some good points. For example, why does everyone need to reinvent the GUI wheel (as if we didn't have enough widget sets and window managers to deal with on *nix)? Why does everything have to be skinable?
I use MPlayer extensively -- but I don't touch the GUI, I have a text-based front-end for it. When it comes to playing video files, scaling, utilizing my ATI's TV-Out, etc -- MPlayer kicks all sorts of ass.
However, it's such a common trend these days to make everything skinable, and to create one's own interface standards. That's one of the things I hate most about WMP for Windows (that, and it periodically just stops functioning).
It's one thing I hate about Mozilla (why can't they use the native menus and widgets?) -- though I use Mozilla exclusively, I still feel a lot of time was wasted implementing their own text box (that still doesn't work quite right), menus, etc...
While I personally use MPlayer, I can't say I'd recommend it to someone who doesn't know how to compile software (using a specific gcc version no less), figure out the appropriate command-line options, etc. Tried to walk a semi-linux-literate person through it, and he still has no working MPlayer. As for the GUI, I also wouldn't recommend it, for most of the reasons noted in Jamie's rant.
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...command-line MPlayer works perfectly for me. Aside from that, he certainly lets people know what's wrong with the projects they've spent most of their lives on.
He's one of the implementors of the original Netscape on Unix/X11, part of the Mozilla team (IIRC he actually named it Mozilla), and part of the original XEmacs team.
Not to mention xscreensaver (which, I think, ships with every Linux distro out there), and a few other cool hacks.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
JWZ should learn how to program and work on his own video player, if he's so unhappy.
So, uh, yeah, JWZ wrote XEmacs (Lucid Emacs), the Unix version of Netscape, and was instrumental in getting the Mozilla project up and running. What the fuck have you done, again?
Does anyone actually play video in a resized window? Surely only "normal" size and fullscreen are ever used? By the way, Windows Media Player up to version 6 at least did the same trick.
Oh, I didn't realize that a shitty "feature" is ok, as long as some old version of windows software did the same thing. After all, the point of any free software project isn't to create an excellent program in its own right, its just to emulate the equivalent windows version, flaws and all, right?
Because of course, mplayer is so hard to remember.
He was responding to the "advice" that to make MPlayer truely usable, he should simply not compile in the UI. You've got to admit, thats a truly, painfully shitty comment on the state of MPlayer's interface. It doesn't matter how easy you think the damn keystrokes are to remember, its still a fucking usability nightmare when the best piece of advice you can get is "Don't even bother to compile the UI"
If you look for reasons to be unhappy with ANYTHING, you'll find them. Why not focus on what's good and what needs to be improved?
The thing is, he does make some good points. For example, why does everyone need to reinvent the GUI wheel (as if we didn't have enough widget sets and window managers to deal with on *nix)? Why does everything have to be skinable?
I use MPlayer extensively -- but I don't touch the GUI, I have a text-based front-end for it. When it comes to playing video files, scaling, utilizing my ATI's TV-Out, etc -- MPlayer kicks all sorts of ass.
However, it's such a common trend these days to make everything skinable, and to create one's own interface standards. That's one of the things I hate most about WMP for Windows (that, and it periodically just stops functioning).
It's one thing I hate about Mozilla (why can't they use the native menus and widgets?) -- though I use Mozilla exclusively, I still feel a lot of time was wasted implementing their own text box (that still doesn't work quite right), menus, etc...
While I personally use MPlayer, I can't say I'd recommend it to someone who doesn't know how to compile software (using a specific gcc version no less), figure out the appropriate command-line options, etc. Tried to walk a semi-linux-literate person through it, and he still has no working MPlayer. As for the GUI, I also wouldn't recommend it, for most of the reasons noted in Jamie's rant.
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