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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."
A GREAT BIG THANK YOU TO YOU AND THE REST OF THE MPLAYER TEAM!!!
You saved our day when there was no decent video player for Linux some two years ago. You brought us the Microsoft ASF fileformat support and Sorenson Quicktime.
I will never forget.. MPlayer played a vital role in Linux's success. The best videoplayer on this planet! So fast it's hard to believe!
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?
The owls are not what they seem
It depends on what you're trying to achieve. If your first priority is to make a movie player / encoder package for Linux that rocks, then you may have to make compromises with your purest vision of open source technology, at least for a period.
Of course each person has the option of not downloading and using the windows binaries, but I will guarantee that for those who use mplayer as their main video player, when they have the choice of using mplayer's
I think the last thing the world needs is another media framework. Not that it's a bad idea per se, or that gstreamer is bad. But there are too many perfectly good frameworks already. And they all have one thing in common: while they promise ultimate flexibility and all kinds of ubercool features, in practice, only a few combinations of plugins work really well. And even those would have worked better if they had simply been integrated into a single app.
What we need is code that does heavy lifting. Code that can read and write all sorts of file formats and that can do so at blistering speeds. But that requires mindnumbing attention to detail and painstaking testing on a wide range of different files and machines. So that most people prefer to indulge in the fantasy that all of this difficult work will just somehow evaporate, just as long as there is a good framework: "it's the bureaucracy, stupid". Of course, that rarely, if ever, pans out. At best, the grandiose Framework is reduced an API for manipulating media clips (QuickTime). At worst, it forever remains a flaky research project to satisfy the will-to-power of a few geeks and true believers (http://www.sourceforge.net).
Now that last part was a bit flamebaity. But what I'm trying to say is that instead of spending time on developing a "media framework" that can do "every conceivable thing", is almost always better to spend your time considering which of those "conceivable things" actually makes sense: and implementing that.
"How do I..." "RTFM IDIOT!!!11"
You mean THAT A'rpi ?
I think that attitude is something that easily happens if you invest too much time and devotion into a project, especially if that project is really rather complex and draws the attention of a lot of newbies to Linux who want to watch vidz. If you're trying to focus on the development with hundreds of dependencies to keep in mind and every day you get the same "How do I.." FAQs on the mailing list, I guess you tend to go down the "It's in the docs, check the README file", "Please read the docs, it's all in there", "PLEASE read the docs, we didn't write them for fun" "READ THE GODDAM FUCKING DOCS!!" route rather quickly.
Maybe projects like this should have separate PR people who are not as directly involved with development but know enough about the project to hand out clues to newbies, keeping the coders free to focus on deeper things.
Most everyone here should know that a free project with no incoming profit stream usually comes with that big "no warranty expressed or implied" disclaimer, and no technical support. This, however, is only a disclaimer, and a lot of project development teams are very helpful and responsive to users questions. This is a good thing that is happens so much, but as usual there is a dark side. Users become 4 year old spoiled brats.
... Manual/Source), but from what I hear he has no desire to play tech support guy for the hundreds of users of mplayer. What should we think of this? I think that I don't blame him, I'd be telling people to F Off too, I don't have time for that shit. Is free not enough for you people here? I'm sick of seeing crap like "I would use MPlayer, but the author told me to RTFM!"
I've had no personal experience with this guy before, as I haven't run into a problem in mplayer I couldn't fix myself from RTFM/S (Reading the
Boo Fucking Hoo