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MPlayer 1.0Pre1 Is Here
bfree writes "Now on your favourite mplayer mirror you can find the 1.0Pre1 release of Mplayer! While work is underway on a second-generation version of Mplayer, I have already fired off emails to my Windows-based friends to let them now that the one player to rule them all now has (preview) support for their OS (I've only looked at a precompiled command line version on Windows but it handled everything I threw at it so far except DVDs). Big changes include Windows (via mingw32 and cygwin) ports, as well as Mac OS X (with extra-accurate Darwin timers). Now if only all those legal questions would go away, perhaps we could have a new killer Free Software application to save people installing Real, Quicktime and Windows Media Player (on Linux!?) or perhaps it's the one application to finally tell the **AA where the world wants to go today!"
Anyone who wants to see linux succeed as something more than a BDD (braindeaddesktop) for consumer media playback - that's who. Without an easily extendable structure based upon standardized "pathways" every new app will have to recreate (or patch) all those codecs and media pathways.
Ever "rip" a DVD? Without "rippers" you would have much less "free" content to play on that player. And one tool in the toolkit of most rippers is AVISynth. Try making an app like that run on a system that doesn't have an extensible media playback/authoring structure.
I realize dependancy hell is considered the linux nirvana, but for most of the folks who DON'T want to get a fucking CS degree just so they can make their own anime music videos or dvds for grandma, this feature is an absolute necessity. I installed XP on a system two weeks ago for a young friend and within three days she had already made a few music videos. This was on a system that would not properly run either linux nor win2k - but XP just installed, worked OOTB, and in just an afternoon of playing with the thing she had crafted together her first music video from all those MPEG and AVI clips she collected from kazaa.
Granted this was with OOTB tools and, if linux would actually run on her system (I mean, with sound and reasonably HQ video playback) I might have been able to install a primitive media authoring tool that would compete with the thing that ships with XP. So even tho it may have been more work for me, from her perspective linux would have been just as easy to use as XP.
Except there isn't such an app for linux, really. Wonder why?