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MPlayer 0.90 released; MPlayer Maintainer Leaves
Viqsi writes "459 days after the previous stable release, the MPlayer folks have finally released stable version 0.90. With this done, A'rpi (th head maintainer) is leaving the project, citing too-much-free-time-forever-lost issues, and the team is looking closely at revising the way the project is managed as a result. Here's hoping some improvements come out of this."
Well Arpi is still there on the mailinglist doing stuff, he's just not the maintainer any longer.
Next to this obvious cheering, it is a fact that mplayer is the most versatile player around that I can think of. I've seen lots of cases that mplayer is capable of player files with odd framerates (audio and video, mainly produced by a bad configured digital camera) while other (includeing M$ mplayer) players choked on it.
...)
Since the license change, I've seen that (that allowed binary packaging) it is gradualy pushing other players to the background, exaclty due to it's versatility (aviplayer, xine, vlc,
The documentation seems to be somewhat lacking and for some things I (still) use IMHO better tools:
video recording: nvrec, AFAIK mplayer does not support V4L2
encoding: transcode, mainly because transcode seems to have a much better doc and logical buildup of the options to transcode and large modularity (for filters). I use mencoder sometimes when transcode has problems with particular file (or used to)
One thing which no player seems to pull of correctly, is to play files with awfully synced audio, video...
Genius doesn't work on an assembly line basis. You can't simply say, "Today I will be brilliant."
Not many know this but texstar has a awesome package for embedding Mplayer into Konqueror. This is just awesome.
Big thanks to the developers., for this one.
MPlayer ability to play hacked codecs is indeed a nice feature, but there's so much more the love about it, especially in the realms of performance (extremely low CPU usage), interface (sweet, sweet, command line, anti-aliased subs and osd), and flexablity (lots of other programs use mplayer, like MythTV and the mozilla-mplayer plugin that allows Linux users to watch movies in their browser). MPlayer manages to do a crap load of things without being bloated or slow.
According to the FAQ you can compile it on Windows using Cygwin. On the subject of ports, Mac OS X users may be interested in MPlayer OS X.
"I merely pointed out the hypocricy of calling MPlayer an open source revolution that stomps closed source into oblivion when its core performance is enabled by closed source (unlicensed) binaries?" What bullshit. MPlayer's "core performance" remains the same whether or not it was compiled with support for Win32 codecs. I do use the right tool for the right job, and that tool is MPlayer. The ability to play Win32 codecs is merely a bonus to me, and help in a pinch whenever I have the misfortune of needing to watch a Real video clip. 99% of my videos are encoded in open codecs like XviD anyway. The point is that MPlayer rocks regardless of what codec its playing, and to say that its only value is the ability to play win32 codecs is to be completely ignorant to what an amazing piece of technology it is in it's own right.
If you need a really good mediaplayer on windows, mac or other platforms, please check out VLC http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ which is a VERY good alternative to both XINE and MPlayer. It plays video directly out of bin/cue-files and does all sorts of good stuff.
Free of course. Sister project is free videostreaming!
The GStreamer project aimed to do this and xine already has support for demuxer, codec, output, etc plugins (indeed all the DVD features used by xine used to exist as a totally separate project at dvd.sf.net).
Rich
This has changed dramatically. No, seriously you are talking about the past. Which parts of the documentation do you find lacking? I'm the documentation maintainer and I will try to address the points you may make...