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."

Comments

well

[daserver]

Well Arpi is still there on the mailinglist doing stuff, he's just not the maintainer any longer.

Re:THANKS ARPI!

[den_erpel]

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...

Embedded Mplayer

[mrsev]

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.

Re:Embedded Mplayer

[the_real_tigga]

there is a package called mplayerplug-in which provides a plugin for all netscape-compatible browsers (including opera).

Re:Congrats to the MPlayer team!

[Longinus]

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.

will it lose the race against xine?

[Pivot]

From his second posting;

> IMHO mplayer is good enough now that it won't lost in /dev/null if i leave.
> > Probably not, but will it lose the race against xine?

imho we lose it already. see xine, its popularity started to grow since a month and keeps growing. while we spend our expensive time by rev. engineering codecs, optimizing code, writing demuxers, they improve the gui. then they 'steal' the others and win. we have no chance against xine... Ah, stability. Yes, in old days mplayer was rock solid while xine crashed at every second click. It has been changed: mplayer is now everything but stable (thanks to that many hacks and 10l bugs), while xine improved stability a lot...

Re:Windows port?

[bodin]

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!

Oh come on...

[Replicant7]

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...