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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."
.90 has been a long time in coming, but the wait was well worth it. I continue to be astounded by what mplayer and mencoder are capable of, and I shudder to think of what my Linux movie watching experience would be like without them. I hate to sound like a cheer leader, but I just don't think enough can be said about the fine work that A'rpi and Co. have produced over the years. In addition to our beloved kernel, it's always nice to have examples of open source software that so readily stomps into irrelevance its closed source competition. Good luck to A'rpi in whatever the future holds, and a thousand thanks for your contributions to the community.
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.
wait a minute, why this sound so familiar?.....
Oh! Micro*shot*
How about a Windows port of MPlayer? I know there are a lot of great players for Win, but I'd love to get rid of the *many* programs I need to play the various formats under Windows.
Uh, please, don't suggest using Linux, I already do, I am a dual-booter, I just want something like MPlayer under Win as well.
Ander
@=
I think a projects like gstreamer has far more future than mplayer. It's true that mplayer has far more codec support, but what is really needed is a multimedia architecture, such as gstreamer.
This is one important step getting linux closer to the desktop.
still reading?
Of course, I don't mean to complain, for goodness sakes. A'rpi has done an amazing job. I recently introduced a friend of mine to linux, and he was awe-struck by the huge functionality and flexibility of mplayer. I will always be greatfull for the development that has gone into this wonderful program that I use every day.
Mplayer only just recently got inverse-telecine, which is a Good Thing for those of us who like to archive a lot of shows.... I used to have to use virtaldub under wine if I wanted to get IT done right [for truly treasured movies... the rest I just deinterlaced and accepted the quality loss].
The only remaining quibble I have with mplayer, actually most specifically with mencoder, is the lack of any threaded/forked/etc rendering pipeline. I am somewhat in the minority in having a SMP system, but there are a good deal of us out there. It causes me such pain to not have quite enough cpu to do certain realtime effects while encoding, to fall behind, while I see CPU0 pegged to 100%, and CPU1 just sitting there idle.
There was a big occasion for disagreement a while back, when someone tried to get some threading into mplayer, even had working patches. A'rpi refused. He had somewhat of a point; the context switching overhead actually wastes cycles on a single processor. [As well as flushing the cache at inoportune times]. Threading on a uniprocessor system would only really help with I/O latencies, but mplayer has great cacheing, and manages well, even with just a single context.
I'm torn between being hopefull that maybe there will be more openess to future improvements such as SMP support, but I'm also sad to see such a wonderfull developer throw in the towel. MPlayer probably wouldn't have happened without him.
---
the pen is mightier then the sword. the sword is mightier then the court. the court is mightier then the pen.
And I really hope they loose theit fear of Version number 1.0. I am pretty amnazed that Arpi leaves without having a half decent 1.0 out. gui is still disabled by default. Why? Largefiles: disabled. Why? The output mplayer sends to stdout is still a incredible mess. I wonder why he leaves the project without cleaning up these few last bits. In principle MPlayer is the most usable, stable, and featurefull media player for linux. Only thing is, it's a mess.
I hope the first thing they do is clean up the code. MPlayer lost _many_ developers to xine lately. xine has not caught up to MPlayer in speed and number of supported formats. Also it seems to be still less stable and more vulnerable to broken video files, but the code base is MUCH more clean (xine sources can actually be called beautifull) Maybe this disruption of MPlayer development can also be seen as a chance for a more unified default mediaplayer for linux, i.e. xine.
The one thin xine is lacking is an encoder a la mencoder. But there is some development with enix. The design looks as clean and easy as xine and I am pretty confident that enix can catch up to mencoder in a short time provided that some more developers are interested.
Cheers
KdenLive/PIAVE - non-linear video editing
It would have been a far more useful release had it been made 2 months ago, as we've had the top linux distros all release new versions in the last month or so.
Easy to say that in hindsight, sure, but it may mean that people who were using mplayer will switch to Xine in the latest distro releases.
I've switched to Xine with the latest release of Mandrake I'm testing, except for DVD movies, which I use mplayer for, starting it with a shell script - mplayer is just so damn fine at playing DVD's (with a bit of timing tweaking)
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
Because new formats hit the market... Um... Maybe once a year?
If there was a system-independent plugin mechanism
There would also be no system dependant optimizations.
there wouldn't be so much redundant work, with everyone doing the same things from scratch, for each player, and on each platform.
The work is in figuring out how a file format works and how to decode it at fast as possible with the highest possible quality. Most of the rest is just preference, and you don't even want to generalize that.
Developers are very keen on the cost of even the slightest code duplication, but they rarely consider the cost to the user of having to hunt for and install the latest libraries, the small bugs that are caused by slightly different versions of libraries, and the tripling or even quadrupling of development time that it takes to produce solid resuable code.
looks like i was waay too nervous while trying to make a firstpost. Of course youre right, Mplayer rocks, and it resides on my Mediahub at home. Maybe someone could explain to me why it isnt included in most distributions yet? I once read about licensing issues but still dont fully understand.
cu,
Lispy
I wanted to THANK YOU, and A'rpi of course, for what you've done. I would also like to thank the PLF at http://plf.zarb.org for making it useable on non-gcc 2.95 machines and for making the plugins so accessible.
Mplayer is a kickass player compared to any OS/media player. Using linux would suck to no end without you.
Made up my mind about what? All i'm trying to say is that often times people get confused and it's not the best course of action to blindly respond to such queries with "RTFM," or a similarly rude statement. While there is some onus on the users to execute their part of the bargain, idealy, some effort should be made to help the ones who have acted responsibly, but still need help. If you don't want to take the time to figure out who is who, then your user base is better off if you don't bother replying at all. Let someone else do it. I'm having trouble seeing exactly what part of that you are objecting to.....
elisist - someone who believes in rule by an elite group ant: egalitarian (from Wordnet )
This is exactly what I'm talking about. The whole RTFM business is "once you know what you are talking about, you are allowed into our society." One of the earlier posters even mentioned how A'rpi complained because his project was in the control of the linux newbie crowd. How is that not elitism?
And according to American Heritage Dictionary, through Dictionary.com my use of the word "ass" to describe a stupidly self important person is not an expletive.
"To save the planet, I had to go to the worst spot on Earth, and that was Philadelphia." -- Sun Ra
Hi,
You write:
> The other kind is where someone writes software
> they want lots of other people to use and they
> develop it using the open source model.
> If you are making the second kind of software
> you need to make a gui.
Indeed I'm often reminded of the stunning GUIs associated with gcc, samba, apache and the Linux kernel.