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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."
I'm in shock! No Mplayer-pre576 !
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
.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.
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!
...they should turn the entire core into a lib and leave the whole GUI and frontend stuff to ppl who have time to waste with GUI and frontend development.
MPlayer is so cool.. they dont need to write their own GUI...
Well Arpi is still there on the mailinglist doing stuff, he's just not the maintainer any longer.
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*
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.
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
Yes. And we love it!
Seriously, ofcourse it had been better to do it in some other way, but what do you propose?
This is by far the best Linux Media Player out. Plays all my pr0n :)
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.
Strangely enough, each thread I comment on, seems to lead into a discussion relevant to a story not-yet-posted.
h ol d=3&commentsort=0&tid=188&mode=nested&cid=5684 779
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=59962&thres
Basically, perhaps the best idea for a media player, is to work-out a robust, system-independant, plugin mechanism. That way, everything else (audio/video output, interface, etc) can be done seperately from the decoding/encoding. A media player is much more useful if you don't have to recompile it to add support for one more format. Windows Media Player, Real Player, and Quicktime all have the ability to download plugins, the only problem is that they are very-much system specific. If there was a system-independent plugin mechanism, there wouldn't be so much redundant work, with everyone doing the same things from scratch, for each player, and on each platform.
A media player on Linux, Windows, Mac, or even a hardware device, could all use the same plugin, which you can store along with your media file if you like.
The only thing that would have to be done for each platform, is to build a user interface, and write the native input/output calls. Sure, that's not so simple, but so much work is going into the codecs, that such a system would greatly simplify things. Just think, a Windows user could write a plugin for his video player, which you could then just copy over to your plugin folder, and play the same format.
One stiplation, it is very unlikely embedded developers will adopt a piece of software if it is under a license more restrictive than the BSD, so a reference implimentation would have to be BSD licensed. (The folks at Xiph.org understood that)
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
"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!
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.
...I had joined the mailing list and the beginning of every message is "RTFM." It's quite insulting they'd think this incomplete project has complete documentation and answers every question.
I had mentioned, as a user, things that should be addressed and they kept saying things like "use the CLI" for that. Utterly ridiculous.
I am hopeful that someone will step up and guide development. Actually, I'd do it myself if I thought people would listen to me. I am not a developer and I think that'd be reason enough to disqualify me.
I hope these things improve... it's a good project.
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 !
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.
Why would anyone want a GUI in a movie player? Movie theaters and TVs don't have GUIs, they just show it all in fullscreen, just they way I want it. A GUI would only be a distraction and a waste of screen real estate.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
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
IMHO, the real strength of MPLayer is that it doesn't need ANY GUI! Just fire it up in fullscreen and enjoy the Movie.
-adnans
"In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people." --Linus Torvalds
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...
Sheesh, people like you make Linux look more and more like Windows.
"No, we don't need functionality, we need a framework!" (add "distributed", "real-time", "platform-independent" or "byte-code" to enhance the buzziness)
"No, we don't need functionality, we need a pretty GUI!"
"No, we don't need functionality, we need XML support!"
I was able to build an embedded video playing machine using mplayer and Linux on a VIA C3 box in just 8 Megs of boot image size! Forget all that framework and XML and X and GUI and Gtk bullshit. You can stick your GNOME and ORBit where the sun don't shine. I just want to view movies on my machine, without your framework mania forcing me to install 3.1415e926 dependency packages first.
That is the reason why mplayer rules by such a margin: it doesn't need fifty trillion packages which add no real value to the application itself.
Not wanting to be objectionable ... but ... i've actually found mplayer to be slower than xine. I've got both on my 500MHZ K6-2 laptop and I can (just about) watch a DVD with xine. With Mplayer the CPU pegs and i get frame drops. To be fair I didn't try very hard to make mplayer work; but then again neither did I try very hard to make xine work. Anyone got any idea why this would be? I assume that I am incorrect in my assesment that xine is faster as the oft reported benefit of mplayer is its incredible speed...
Xine recently seems to have taken a few leaps and bounds as well. The DVD nav stuff is working very nicely. There are a lot less crashes, the GUI is a lot more stable.
I doubt whether competition is a bad thing anyway. At all other times in the OSS world competition has been beneficial, not least because they can steal each others code.
Carpe Daemon