Slashdot Mirror
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!"
Xine? (Well in my opinion, xine is too buggy, crashes on most files and its gui sucks)
Videolan? (I never tried it)
Kmplayer? (The KDE port of mplayer, its got lovely kde goodness)
Gstreamer? (Well gstreamer is just the library, but it has gst-player and totem as guis, but the library is still in beta, but stabler than Xine)
Ogle?
Xmovie?
RealPlayer (linux version)?
I don't have time to try it now, so id like some opinions.
How many hours did you waste while you wrote yet another skinned user interface? How many hours did you waste with Gimp while you made all those nifty default skins? How many hours of everyone elses time do you waste when people despreately install new skins in order to find the one that is even remotely usable?
GUI widget sets are there to make it easy for programmers and designers to make user interfaces that are consistent and easy to learn. By implementing your very own eye candy skin framework you undermine all the hard work made by all those smart people.
This is not a troll. Go read a book or two about user interface design.
Antti S. Brax - Old school - http://www.iki.fi/asb/
I've downloaded a couple of monts ago a windows binary of mplayer. It didn't played any divx I threw at it... It just kept "saying your machine is too slow to play this file". I agree with jkeyes and Zarhan: the best way to watch movies in Windows is through the mighty Media Payer Classic.
Keep your Xine....
Mplayer is built right. A command line player and a GUI that is seperate.
That way mplayer can be used as a part of a larger project... freevo ring a bell?
It blows my mind how many projects for linux are rendered useless for many uses simply because the programmers think that the GUI MUST be a part of the app...
It doesn't and makes your program less useful.
mplayer is the best player out for linux. Until you can seperate the gui out of Xine easily at compile time... Xine cant even compete....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
No, mplayer does fuck all. The codecs - if you install them, which presupposes that you know what a codec is - do as much as you can do with Windows Media Player.
Is there really so much confusion over this issue? Joe Windows is a cretin. He doesn't use the auto update feature built in to the OS. What chance has he got of figuring out that the reason he can't watch BangBus #42 is because he needs to download RalphVideo 3.21 and BobsAudio 0.0.3.2.1?
Once again we're confusing two issues. I use and like mplayer, and I'm glad to see a new version. But there's nothing here for Joe Windows, and I'm calling bullshit on the article body.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Thats not the simple solution, thats the "crap" solution. Thats like telling someone to use TWM because they found KDE 3 a little flashy for their tastes.
I sense a LOT of 1337ist attitudes (grudges?) against the idea of using Mplayer on Win32.
Why? What's with that?
What ever happened to the ideal of free software for everyone INCLUDING convincing the unwashed Windoze masses of the superiority of FOSS?
okay ENOUGH!
how many god damn browsers, players, desktops, editors do we need?
I'm tired of seeing all this wasted talent just so GNOME or KDE can have thier own everything. swallow your damn pride and work together for crying out loud. True everyone has thier own tastes well here is a fucking revelation, code the fucking thing to be customizable. I understand why gnome was started and that makes sence but think of how good "knome" would be by now if there was only one.
You know what i'm an advocate of? I want to see a 'stability' year.. where EVERYONE freezes the fucking features and spends a complete year stabalizing, polishing thier work. Since OSS developers in alot of cases have no boss, they tend to want to move on to the next 'fun' feature.
well thats enough time spent on something you 'free thinkers' will just mod down as flamebait or offtopic.. keep dumping your heads in the sand that will make all the problems go away.
Who needs a plugin extendable "media framework" when the player simply works?
I would counter that the big problem facing many other linux video players is the fact that they were developed as great "frameworks" but no one really worried about whether they actually played files.
This problem exists in other projects I've downloaded and tried (I won't name names of course). The typical app is a great skinnable, plugin-able, dynamically loadable uber-framework, but when it comes down to actually performing the task it's designed for, well, that'll be ready next release.
Lumping QuickTime in with WMP and Real is pretty unfair. Where Quicktime provides a complete and sophisticated architecture for media manipulation as well as a completely open API that shows no platform preference across the desktop platforms (and the servier is available for nearly everything), Real and WMP use proprietary formats and are nothing but players with some very poorly designed and implemented media collection management tools. MPlayer is just another player, it is not in the same class of product as Quicktime.
You can also try kmplayer, which is included with kde's extragear packages.
I personally like kplayer the best.. I think they are adding xine to that too.
Unless you require a scrollbar to navigate a movie, MPlayer generally works well when you associate it with Nautilus. I double-click on a thumbnail for a movie (generated by Gnome-Thumbnail-Factory) and MPlayer launches with the movie. I run it without the GUI though, so I merely use the arrow keys to navigate the movie, SPACE to pause, Q to quit.
It's true though, that MPlayer's GUI is sucky. I wish that they'd just use a standard GTK based deal, and not some rediculous XMMS/Winamp sort of skin, which by the way also drastically increases the CPU load when playing video files. I've thought of writing a better GUI for MPlayer, but I just don't know enough about GTK programming. Lumiere is a great project, but I've not been able to get it to compile because it is beta code (and is for some reason heavily dependant on specific system configurations and file locations).
MPlayer is fully functional without any GUI. So what's wrong with using it without a GUI then?
I think people are determined to use MPlayer (and everything else) from a GUI, just because that's what they've been used-to in the Windows and Mac world... NOT because there is any legitimate reason to do so.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
What the fuck does this have to do with anything? Mod this down!
Zodiac Survey
Try using Mplayer from just the command line. It's a lot simpler that way and you never have to mess with the mouse. It sounds annoying, but it's actually much better than the traditional menu/button setup. Having switched from linux to macos x (sweet, sweet powerbooks), not being able to run movies off the command-line (and not being able to watch half my movies) has been one of my big complaints.