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Mplayer Revisited
Joe Barr writes "It's been two years since I first wrote about Mplayer. Maybe the fury of the developers/community reaction to the fact that I dared to criticize them for their treatment of users kept me away. Whatever. Now Mplayer has a pre1 version of release 1.0 out there and it's time for another look." Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN.
MPlayer has matured, both in code and attitude over the last year or so, or at least I've found it to be true. I never really had trouble installing it in the first place (all you had to do was *gasp* read the directions and follow them), but the install has gotten easier. I find that it also works better on my PC now. Additionally, their teams seems to had lost a bit of the attitude-- a quick glance over the docs doesn't reveal any references to how stupid the average mplayer user is :). Maybe they finally realized that attitude was offending some people,and hurting the project, so they got over themselves.
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Crudely Drawn Games
I fully understood the frustration the MPlayer community, which in my experience has always been very helpful and very proactive trying to create something that'll be ideal at the end of it (they may be wrong in some of the directions they've taken, but I don't doubt their motives), and really found the Barr article and his apologists somewhat disappointing. Barr really seemed to write the article in order to fire up a storm, certainly the quote out of context, an aggressive maneuver which it's hard to believe wasn't deliberate, backs this up.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
WOO HOO for mPlayer. I remember back in the day trying to get that mutha to compile. It was a pain in the neck. But once i did it, i had VIDEO ON LINUX!!! WOW. Now it is used all over as underpinnings for other apps. Its projects like these that are so great. This is where i feel opensource shines. Instead of doing a lot of work yourself, take a project that is established and working, and extend it. Xbox media player and now Xbox media Center both use mPlayer. By using the source that was available to them, it increased time to live so to speak. It works great and supports TONS of formats. Why reinvent the wheel. Especially in video players and html renderers (KHTML, MOZ).......
Why did they pointlessly violate the established (and useful) double-dash for long options convention in favour of an ugly and irregular one dash for all options? I'm aware that it's probably an imitation of the X standard, but in this day and age that's probably not a good thing to imitate. Also, it doesn't allow you to abbreviate with one-character options.
You look beautiful! Incidentally, my favourite artist is Picasso.
IIRC, do the usual things necessary to download RealPlayer for Linux, select RedHat ix86 RPM format, and then look for the link. That's how it was a few months ago, I don't know if it's been made a more findable download since.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
The Mplayer project's distribution of copyrighted win32 codecs is illegal.
One needs explicit permission from the copyright holder to distribute copyrighted works.
The Mplayer project does not have such permission from Apple, Microsoft and Real.
The codecs are available for free (as in beer) from their respective owners, but the included EULAs do not grant permission to redistribute.
It is obvious why Mplayer has yet to be accepted by Debian. The Mplayer team has no respect for copyright law and continues to violate the law.
More seriously, there *is* a wrong and right way.
Ask a specific question. If you say "Can someone help me to get X working...", you're going to get a "no". Why? Think of what you actually just asked -- you, one of zillions of people, just said "will you commit an unknown amount of time to providing me with support for free".
If you say "When I run foo, I get a 'RTC support not included' error. What can I do to fix this?", and you *checked* the documentation and google first, then you're likely to have a lot more luck, because the other folks can immediately respond with an answer. They just can't *do* anything with a "it doesn't work" post, and most folks are not interested in investing the time require to send out another post with a list of what information is required so that perhaps they can get a response back so that perhaps they can fix a random person's problem. You need to send out a post with enough information to allow the folks you're asking for help to answer your question without immediately needing to ask you for even more information.
This is no different from free support for closed-source software. You'll get the same response on USENET if asking a question about Half-Life. If you're paying someone to sit on the phone and answer questions (like someone at Microsoft with an MSDN support incident, or someone at Red Hat with a commercial support package), *then* things may be different.
It's not just a matter of *insulting* the other person -- you need to include enough information to let them do your request.
May we never see th
Windows software installs without a manual
It also isn't being installed from source, rarely has anything close to the option flexibility of source-installed software, and is usually completely useless in the event that something fails in the process. I have a copy of VS6 here that bombs near the end of the installer and there's not a damn thing I can do about it, for example. I have shit installed here that won't uninstall properly and, short of removing it manually and hunting down and undoing every little registry key and config change, there's not a damn thing I can do about it.
Why does everything have to be "the way Windows does it"? Windows sucks, that's why I use Linux and BSD. I don't WANT it to act like Windows. That's the POINT. It's NOT Windows and it WORKS, that's why I LIKE it. It's not hard to type "apt-get something". I'm sick of people apologizing for users who are too coddled and/or stupid and/or lazy to even do that - it's how you wind up with people with busted-ass systems who call you up and whine all the time that the "computer is broken". Gee - that's because you installed every damn thing you came across by double-clicking randomly...
It's okay to make things easier to a point, but you have to put some responsibility on people for what they install. Windows doesn't, and, as a result (aong with some other issues), most Windows systems out there are hideously broken beyond repair.
Besides, if you're going to immitate ease-of-use, immitate Macs, not Wintels.
We're "better than them" not because we're "1337 d00dz", but because we actually make people stop and think about what they're about to do before they do it...
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
Like I said: I found it died a lot. I tried with The Matrix and it died three times getting to the main menu, a couple of times it died immediately on trying to play the movie, and a couple more times during playback. It just disappears without any message.
There is a world of difference between toothpastes competing in a store and the NECESSARY unification of design required for Linux to ever successfully penetrate the desktop market.
All right, OCG, I'll bite this time. :)
We're not dealing with commercial companies competing with each other, but that doesn't mean we're not dealing with groups competing with each other. MPlayer and Xine are in some pretty heated competition, last I heard. Either one of these projects would love to get a one-up over the other. Also, both projects just LOVE to do something that hasn't been done before, and they LOVE to make it work reliably. MPLayer, to my knowledge, is the first Linux movie player to use native win32 codecs to play certain formats, without WINE.
That said, even in the commercial sector, there has always been lots of choices and fighting between different application developers. From the early days when we had more word processors available than we had kilobytes of ram in our computers, that hasn't changed. Why should open source be any different? I'd venture to say that the reason for all the competition is probably just that it is simply a reflection of life in the real world. In all endeavors, everywhere, there is competition. You can't do something without someone saying "I can do that better". Frequently they do it.
You may as well say "Why have all these separate, independent commercial developers? Why not combine all of their efforts into one company that can focus on making the software the best it can be?" But we consider that bad. Why would it be any better if we made it an idealistic utopia? The Linux kernel is as good as it is in part because Linus encourages competition and lets the best code win, and getting better in part because of this.
COmpetition is good. I will concede that there is a point where too much competition indicates the resources are really spread, and some consolidating would be a good thing, but I don't think we've reached that point here. We have two excellent media players, and they're both highly competitive with one another, so they keep getting better. Everybody benefits, no matter how much "wasted effort" you think is there. Shoe me a project that didn't have competition (such as Mozilla, which doesn't have much) that has not stagnated, become bloated, and generally sucked? Fact is, your girlfriend never looks as pretty when she's your wife. Competition is a good thing.
Like what I said? You might like my music
In short form...
Pros:
Cons:
Maybe a Pro, maybe a Con:
I find it interesting, incidentally, that MPlayer supports Ogg Theora better than XIPH does at the moment, in my opinion....(mplayer actually does play back Ogg Theora files generated by the Theora CVS quite nicely. Now if only Xiph would ever work on Ogg Theora and the Ogg specification again...)
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Well, I probably didn't make my point clear. Each of these programs use different criteria/algorithms to deal with partition tables. And it was this diversity what saved my ass. If they all got merged, they would settle for ONE path to solve a problem. And this is not necessarily good in general ... and wouldn't have probably saved my ass :-)